REFLECTIONS ON CULTURAL ORIGINS: THE VISUAL LANDSCAPE OF THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE

By

JAMIE DI FRANCES

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English

May 2009 Winston-Salem, North Carolina

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank my parents who, from an early age, inspired in me a love for books and enabled me to realize the profound power of the imagination. I am also incredibly grateful to my mother for her meticulous and tireless editing, which assisted in the transformation of rough and often jumbled ideas into beautifully crafted prose. Likewise, I am indebted to my siblings, Annie, Christy, Joshua and Sarah, who, akin to my parents, provided an ever constant source of encouragement and love. Similarly, I would like to thank my professors both at Wisconsin Lutheran College and at Wake Forest University. In this regard, I am deeply indebted to Dr. Peter Fraser and Dr. Martin Moldenhauer for further cultivating my interest in literature during my undergraduate studies. Throughout my master’s degree coursework, Dr. Barry Maine, Dr. Eric Wilson and Dr. William Moss were pivotal figures, stimulating ideas and challenging me to reach new heights of academic achievement. Additionally, I would like to thank Julia Barb, Carrie Butler Laughridge, Mary Beth White, and Anna Gissing, cherished friends who provided encouragement and support when I most needed it and were always there to look after me. Finally, I would like to thank Joel, who provided a daily source of inspiration and love. Ever optimistic, enthusiastic and fun, he comforted me when the world seemed dark, motivated me to continue when I wanted to quit, provided guidance when I felt lost, and brought a smile to my face even on the rainiest of days. I could never have done it without you.

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ABSTRACT This thesis examines the effect advances in the print industry and evolutions in the field of photography, which occurred just prior to the Civil War and throughout the Gilded Age, had on the public perception of war as evidenced in the pages of Stephen Crane’s seminal war novel. By juxtaposing passages from The Red Badge of Courage with specific illustrations and photographs from the Gilded Age, this study seeks to ascertain the origins of Crane’s vibrant imagery, and in so doing, effectively map the novel back upon the locus which gave it birth—the rich, visual media culture of New York City during the latter half of the 19th century. Focusing primarily on Civil War sketch artist drawings, Civil War photographs and contemporary images detailing instances of mechanical encroachment and social violence, I attempt to trace this pivotal transformation in public opinion to its roots in the popular press, particularly the highly mediated portrayals of war disseminated during this period and the voyeurism and spectatorship these violent and disturbing views inevitably engendered. The three chapters in this study highlight three disparate aspects of the visual landscape which figure prominently in either the novel’s descriptive passages or in its imagistic patterns. The confused and chaotic action sequences, which appear to be based on the drawings of Civil War sketch artists, form the premise of chapter one. Static depictions of death and destruction, which originate in the scrupulous labors of photographers like Alexander Gardner and his colleagues, function as the basis of chapter two, while metaphors of mechanization, animalism, anarchy, mob violence, and class conflict are addressed in chapter three’s examination of the media’s sensationalist discourse and biased representations. Thus, I maintain that Crane’s innovative literary aesthetic does not reflect war per se, but rather the Gilded Age’s mediated perception of war.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER 1: The Spectacle of War…………………………………………………10 CHAPTER 2: Photographic Realism and the Corpse Displayed…………………….32 CHAPTER 3: War in the City………………………………………………………..59 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………85 APPENDIX...…………………………………………………………………………90 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………….91

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INTRODUCTION

Perhaps the most striking attribute of Stephen Crane’s Civil War fiction is its

vivid imagery and powerful use of description. Providing a revolutionary depiction of

battle, The Red Badge of Courage reflects a wider cultural phenomenon distinguished by

a transformation of public perceptions of war. Stemming primarily from evolutions in

the production and distribution of print media, this alteration was characterized by a

transference, whereby, through the mass circulation of images dedicated to military

conflict, the chaos and hideousness of combat was symbolically transported from the

battlefield to the living room. As Crane’s novel reflects, this newfound proximity to

conflict gave birth to a strange vicariousness and an aberrant fascination as viewers and

readers alike, mesmerized by the graphic images of violence and death which confronted

them, sought to ascertain the true nature of war. The Red Badge of Courage reflects

Crane’s ambitious attempt to translate this desire into words. Appealing to the Gilded

Age’s appetite for spectacle, the novelist endeavors to craft an evocative and accurate

portrait of war based, not on his personal experiences, but on the representations of

conflict and strife found within the rich visual culture of New York City.

Though the broad and somewhat ambiguous term “visual culture” includes a

multiplicity of media forms, for the purpose of this study, it will be limited to engravings

disseminated by the pictorial press and photographs circulated in the form of stereograph

cards, stereotipicon slides, and war albums. While these images encompassed a variety

of content areas, this inquiry will focus primarily on Gilded Age portrayals of war and

hostility, placing particular emphasis on the drawings of Civil War sketch artists and their

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correlative engravings which were frequently reprinted in historical features such as the

Century Magazine’s series “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” (1884-7), the

photographic archive of Civil War images which includes Alexander Gardner’s famous

Sketchbook, and the contemporary portrayals of mechanical encroachment and social

violence which dominated the pages of popular illustrated periodicals such as Harper’s

and Frank Leslie’s Magazine. By juxtaposing passages from The Red Badge of Courage

with specific illustrations and photographs from the Gilded Age, this study will seek to

ascertain the origins of Crane’s vibrant imagery, and in so doing, effectively map the

novel back upon the locus which gave it birth—the media culture of New York City

during the latter half of the 19th century.

Since the novel’s publication in 1895, The Red Badge of Courage has been widely

celebrated for its uniquely impressionistic quality. Acknowledged by many of Crane’s

contemporaries such as Edward Garnett and Joseph Conrad, this stylistic device did much

to establish the writer’s reputation in artistic and literary circles (Øverland 239). Neither

was this acclaim limited to Crane’s particular historical moment, but rather it continued

to be the subject of critical attention and applause throughout the next century. Thus,

despite the fact that Crane’s literary appropriation and application of impressionistic

technique is but one component of the novel’s literary style, it quickly became the

dominant method for describing his literary aesthetic.

While both Robert Stallman in his book Stephen Crane: An Omnibus (1952) and

Joseph J. Kwiat in his article “Stephen Crane and Painting” (1952) recognize the author’s

indebtedness to the school of French impressionists, they appear content to assert vague

attribution, failing to investigate the contrivance’s innovative application. Indeed, a full

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analysis of Crane’s artistic approach would not be attempted until the 1960s, a decade

which witnessed the publication of three seminal articles: Sergio Perosa’s “Naturalism

and Impressionism in Stephen Crane’s Fiction” (1964), Orm Øverland’s “The

Impressionism of Stephen Crane: A Study in Style and Technique” (1966), and Rodney

Roger’s “Stephen Crane and Impressionism” (1969). While Perosa explores the author’s

relationship with Hamlin Garland, a writer and friend of Crane’s who broached the

subject of impressionism in Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing Chiefly with

Literature Painting and the Drama, and examines the interconnection between

naturalism and impressionism, Orm Øverland embarks on a detailed investigation of the

motif as it appears in Crane’s fiction. Attempting to identify a “meaningful pattern,” the

critic assesses the novel’s fragmented and episodic style, the author’s atypical use of

color, association and descriptive patterns, and the narrator’s limited point of view

(Øverland 280). Furthermore, Øverland analyzes the discontinuous and discrete nature of

human perception as exemplified in the novel stating, “Crane singles out the first detail

that catches the eye, the main impression at this one occasion, and lets it completely

dominate the scene” (252). Though the elevation of the indistinct and ephemeral over the

tangible and material appeals to the domain of sensory perception, it often results in

distortion and confusion. Finally, Øverland stresses the “impressionist’s reluctance to

analyze,” an omission also visible in Crane’s decision to render impressions in relative

isolation. In the absence of a rationalizing consciousness, these transient glimpses of

reality, like the paintings which preceded them, are presented to the reader bereft of a

totalizing narrative (Øverland 264). Completely lacking an interpretive structure, these

disparate impressions force readers to create a sense of coherence, which is then imposed

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upon the scenes before them. In contrast to Øverland’s broad approach, Rodney Rogers

chooses to focus specifically on Crane’s manipulation of viewpoint, which he asserts to

be a reflection of impressionist ideology. Maintaining that “Crane modulates between

dissimilar points of view in at least three distinct ways: by direct, literal statement; by

manipulating narrative focus; and by employing…‘verbal disparity,’” Rogers argues that

these constant fluctuations in perspective and the antithetical perspectives they produce

equally express the transient and variable world conveyed by such French Impressionist

works as Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872) and Degas’ Dancer with a Bouquet of

Flowers (1878) (295). Thus having drawn attention to Crane’s rapid transitions, which

often link radically different perspectives, the critic concludes that, “Crane’s artistic

landscape, however true to realty, remains deceptive, fluxional, paradoxical, protean

rather than procrustean—in short, impressionistic” (304).

James Nagel’s book Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism (1980), a

comprehensive investigation of the topic which functions as a capstone to this area of

study, integrates and expands the ideas posited by Perosa, Øverland and Rogers.

Consisting of five chapters, the examination ambitiously attempts to define literary

impressionism, establish its place in the academic field, and assess the various forms

which it assumes in the cannon of Crane’s work. In the first chapter, entitled

“Backgrounds and Definitions,” Nagel explores the history of impressionistic painting

and its relationship to literature and seeks to differentiate Literary Impressionism from

Realism and Naturalism. In the second chapter, the critic embarks on a survey of Crane’s

narrative methodology, which he maintains “present[s] an Impressionistic epistemology

of a world in which the appearance of reality is constantly in flux, a kinetic world of light

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and shadow, of sensory multiplicity, of confusion and uncertainty” (Nagel 84). The

book’s third chapter is dedicated to impressionistic themes, specifically to “the

empiricism, epistemology and evanescent reality” which characterize this literary mode

(Nagel 113). In the fourth chapter, Nagel undertakes a technical analysis of Crane’s

structure and imagery, and in the concluding section, he again returns to an examination

of the overlapping and fluxional domains of Literary Impressionism, Realism and

Naturalism.

While Impressionism was the predominant approach to Crane’s literary aesthetic

between the novel’s publication in 1895 and the appearance of Nagel’s seminal text in

1980, some recent scholarship, fueled by the rapid growth of new historicism and an

increased interest in cultural studies, has sought to locate Crane’s imagery in other forms

of visual media specific to the novelist’s historical moment. A few studies which pursue

this approach include Amy Kaplan’s article “The Spectacle of War in Crane’s Revision

of History” (1986), Giorgio Mariani’s text Spectacular Narratives: Representations of

Class and War in Crane and the American 1890s (1992), Bill Brown’s study The

Material Unconscious (1996) and Rob Kroes’ essay “Crane and Brady: Parallels to the

Civil War” (1998). Building on this foundation of research and interpretation, this study

will investigate the visual terrain which gave birth to the novel’s vivid and varied

imagery, focusing specifically on the dramatic drawings of Civil War sketch artists, the

startling images captured by Civil War photographers and the popular engravings of

social strife appearing in the pictorial press during the Gilded Age. Instead of merely

identifying and analyzing Crane’s metaphors, these chapters will seek to contextualize

the novel within the visual media culture of New York City in the 1890s and, having

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identified the various influences which may have inspired Crane’s pictorial imagination,

examine their impact on the novel’s development.

The three chapters in this study highlight three disparate aspects of the visual

landscape which figure prominently in either the novel’s descriptive passages or in its

imagistic patterns. The confused and chaotic action sequences, which appear to be based

on the drawings of Civil War sketch artists, form the premise of chapter one. Static

depictions of death and destruction, which originate in the scrupulous labors of

photographers like Alexander Gardner and his colleagues, function as the basis of chapter

two, while metaphors of mechanization, animalism, anarchy, mob violence, and class

conflict are addressed in chapter three’s examination of the sensationalist discourse and

biased representations by the popular press. In addition to their significant role in the

novel, these visual mediums share two other attributes in common: all three render highly

mediated depictions of reality, and all three derive their efficacy from the culture’s

obsession with spectacle. Manipulated first by the artists and photographers who

produced them and later by the copy editors and engravers who converted them into a

publishable form, these images no longer portray reality per se but rather perceptions of

reality, impressions which have been molded by the constructs of their society (see

diagram in Appendix 1). Furthermore, by casting the viewer in the role of spectator,

these images enabled members of the Gilded Age audience to exchange their monotonous

existence for the thrills of the battlefield where they could look on death and experience

danger without fear. The three chapters are arranged in chronological order based on the

first appearance of the images discussed therein. Likewise, chapter one establishes the

historical milieu—placing particular emphasis on evolutions in the print industry and the

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growth of consumerism, nationalism, and militarism in the latter half of the 19th

century—and introduces the ideas of mediation and spectacle which underlie the

arguments of chapters two and three.

Consequently, chapter one will examine the effect advances in print culture which

occurred just prior to the Civil War had on the public perception of war as evidenced in

the pages of The Red Badge of Courage. Focusing specifically on the drawings of Civil

War sketch artists, images reintroduced into the culture during the Gilded Age through

popular weekly publications such as the Century Magazine series “Battles and Leaders of

the Civil War” (1884-87), this chapter will seek to determine how these brutal and

evocative pictures were adopted by Crane’s novel. A regression to the militaristic world

of the 1860s, the resurgence of these graphic war sketches in the 1880/90s appears to

have had a significant influence on the young author’s conception of war. Furthermore,

when these spectacles of violence were reintegrated into the visual culture of late

nineteenth century America, they were incorporated into the ideological paradigm of the

1880/90s, a model predicated on consumerism, escapism and spectatorship. Thus, in his

attempts to craft a realistic portrayal of war, Crane appears to have relied not merely on

the isolated drawings of the sketch artists but also on the cultural constructs of sport and

spectacle which invariably accompanied them.

While the first chapter is concerned with the drawings of Civil War sketch artists

and their correlating engravings, the second chapter will focus on Crane’s utilization of

Civil War photography, particularly Alexander Gardner’s death studies. Though limited

to static bodies, these images provided a powerful portrait of war, albeit a retrospective

one given the fact that early cameras were not capable of capturing the motion of battle

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but only the stillness of battle’s aftermath. To fully comprehend Crane’s appropriation of

these images, however, the reader must analyze not only the photographs themselves, but

the pastoral and sacred martyr myths which developed around them. In an attempt to

mitigate the brutality of these violent and macabre scenes and assimilate the fractured and

futile glimpses of reality they rendered into a coherent and purposeful totality, publishers

and photographers assembled the images in ordered sets and catalogues and crafted a

series of captions and vignettes, which effectively rewrote the messages conveyed by

these traumatic photographs and transformed them into pro-Union propaganda. After

briefly examining Gardner’s Sketchbook of the Civil War, a quintessential example of a

photographic work which exhibits this mythologizing and euphemizing narrative, chapter

two will explore Crane’s inversion and eventual rejection of this interpretive framework.

Systematically dismantling this societal construct and excising the corpse of the soldier

from it, the author of The Red Badge chooses to create a counter-narrative, wherein the

brutal realities of the photographic image are rendered with accuracy and truth instead of

euphemism or sanitizing artifice.

While chapters one and two analyze images from the 1860s which were

reintroduced and reintegrated into the culture of the 1880/90s, chapter three inverts this

paradigm revealing the process by which the illustrated press of the Gilded Age and the

engravings it propagated, specifically those rendered in Harper’s and Frank Leslie’s

Magazine, were projected back upon the tableau of the Civil War battlefield. Providing

fertile soil for Crane’s pictorial imagination, these sensationalized images of metropolitan

life and the often pejorative representational strategies associated with them tended to

center around four primary areas of concern: the mechanization of society, as evidenced

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by the growing power of machines, their dehumanizing effect on the individual, and the

ever increasing incidences of mechanized violence; the sudden rise in urban poverty

which occurred in the wake of America’s rapid industrialization and gave birth to a

dangerous underworld rife with crime, ignorance, and savagery; the anarchy, chaos, and

lawlessness visible in cases of mob violence; and the social stratification and class

conflict which frequently erupted in violent melees between workers and federal troops

acting in the interests of wealthy capitalists. Thus, The Red Badge of Courage, a novel

which depicts the regiment as a machine, soldiers variously as automatons, savages and

animals, the company of infantry as half-crazed mobs, and officers as powerful elites

exploiting enlisted men, reflects the degree to which these images permeated the media

culture of New York City and shaped the collective consciousness and perceptive

framework of its citizenry.

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CHAPTER 1

THE SPECTACLE OF WAR

Within the confines of The Red Badge of Courage, Crane draws a detailed portrait

of an individual’s encounter with the violence and horror of modern warfare. Placing

particular emphasis on the visible aspects of combat such as its chaos, carnage and

kinetic energy, the author creates a visual banquet of sites and impressions which, since

the novel’s publication in 1896, has been widely celebrated for its evocative, and what

many readers have claimed, realistic depiction of the Civil War battlefield. Whether in

the form of a frenzied charge across a corpse-strewn meadow, a blinding burst of a

cannon shell, or a frantic flight from the lines, Crane repeatedly demonstrates a rare

ability to capture motion and craft dynamic, episodic, action sequences which mesmerize

the reader, captivating him/her with the promise of unveiling the true face of war.

Clearly, Crane’s audience, like the soldiers in the novel, desires an immediate

experience with war, yet, one must question, if the author, a man born six years after the

cessation of hostilities, is truly capable of fulfilling this desire. A close reading of the

novel quickly reveals that Crane’s depiction of battle is far removed from the immediate

and is instead a product of several layers of mediation and transformation. The reader of

The Red Badge is not witnessing war per se, but rather the author’s perceptions of war, an

acuity based primarily on the drawings of Civil War sketch artists which were then

filtered and transformed by the media of the 1860s before being reintroduced into and

reinterpreted by the popular culture of the 1880s and 1890s (see diagram in Appendix 1).

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My rationale for making this claim rests on documented proof of Crane’s utilization of

the illustrated Century magazines series “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” and on an

acknowledgement of the significance of Civil War sketches, which due to technological

limitations in the 1860s, were the only form of media capable of rendering action scenes.

Thus, the objective of this study is twofold: first, to examine the effect the archive of

Civil War sketches, when imported into the highly martial and sports obsessed culture of

the 1890s, had on the narrative structure of the Red Badge, and second, to interrogate the

process by which the various levels of mediation which gave birth to the novel recast war

as a spectator sport and the soldier as an insignificant entity forced to fluctuate between

the roles of performer and voyeur. By repeatedly drawing the readers’ eye back to the

loci of the battlefield, Crane effectively reinterprets war as the great spectacle, a

definition much more applicable to the cultural milieu of the imperialistic nation of the

1890s than the war-torn land of the 1860s.

Prior to exploring this query, however, one must first examine the

transformational developments which occurred in the print culture prior to and

throughout the Civil War. Perhaps the most significant change which stemmed from

improvements in the printing process in the 1850s was the birth of the illustrated weekly.

The first to appear on the scene was Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (1855), a

periodical which was quickly followed by Harper’s Weekly (1859) and the New York

Illustrated News (1859) (Campbell 10). The circulation of these weeklies grew

exponentially following the attack on Fort Sumter in response to increased demands of an

inquisitive public, many of whom were not only curious as to the nature of war but

desperate to know the details of the great battles in which their brothers, fathers and

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friends were engaged. Due to the unwieldy nature of wet-plate cameras and inadequacies

in the half tone processes, photography was limited to still-life pictures. Thus the

majority of battle scenes appearing in the illustrated weeklies were the products of

illustrators’ engravings based on the rough sketches of field artists (Catton 9). These

“special artists,” who included Alfred R. Waud, Arthur Lumley, Theodore R. Davis,

William T. Crane, Frank H. Schell, Edwin Forbes, Henri Lovie, William Waud and

Winslow Homer, fulfilled a pivotal need in the culture by providing the public a glimpse

of the battlefield (Campbell 13-4). Through the endeavors of these artists, the distance

between soldier and civilian, which had been a significant factor in all prior military

engagements, was drastically reduced. War was no longer an unknowable tragedy fought

in a distant land, but rather a perceivable drama which could be visualized and

comprehended. As the earliest military conflict to be closely recorded—both verbally and

pictorially—by inexpensive, widely-circulated, highly-illustrated print media, the Civil

War represents the first military campaign which was accessible to the common man.

Though evolutions in the printing processes of the 1860s were a significant

influence on Crane’s portrait of war, they were not the only factor to affect its

development. While the efforts of sketch artists provided the images which inspired

many of the novel’s battle scenes, the cultural changes resulting from America’s rapid

industrialization in the post-war years in conjunction with the rise of nationalism, the

cultivation of a martial spirit, and the birth of spectator sports in the 1880s and 1890s

were the forces largely responsible for transforming these sensory impressions into the

spectacle of war as portrayed in The Red Badge.

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The trend toward industrialization in the latter half of the nineteenth century

marked the advent of American consumerism and drastically altered public opinions

regarding the function of print media. As millions flocked to the cities in search of

work—Chicago tripled in size between 1880 and 1900—American society shifted from

an economy comprised predominantly of autonomous, rural individuals to one

constituted largely of dependent, urban consumers. Giorgio Mariani comments on this

radical inversion in his book Spectacular Narratives wherein he observes, “the dramatic

industrial development of the decades following the Civil War marked a definitive shift

away from an economy of production to one of consumption. In a new social formation

where all men and women were to be addressed as potential consumers, reality had to be

recreated in the mode of theatrical display, of spectacle” (8). The growth of the

advertising industry, the rise of the department store, and the increasing popularity of

mass entertainment comprised just a few harbingers of this modern society (Mariani 8).

Likewise, in The Incorporation of America, Alan Trachtenburg assesses the origination

of mass spectatorship as a dominant means of perception:

The most common, if most subtle, implication of transformed human relations [during the Gilded Age] appeared in the steady emergence of new modes of experience. In technologies of communication, vicarious experience began to erode direct physical experience of the world. Viewing and looking at representations, words and images, city people found themselves addressed more often as passive spectators than as active participants, consumers of images and sensations produced by others. (122)

A striking example of this transformation from direct participation toward vicarious

passivity can be witnessed in the growth of the daily newspaper, particularly Joseph

Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, two

dailies notorious for their propagation of yellow journalism. Thriving on sensationalism,

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these papers offered the reader a portal into an exciting, if slightly voyeuristic, world of

crime, scandal, and intrigue. Regarding this departure from traditional journalistic modes,

Trachtenburg states that the daily newspaper presented “the world as a spectacle of

consumption” in which “surrogate or vicarious familiarity serve[s] only to reinforce

strangeness” (125). The marketing and consumption of spectacle which was initially

used to attract the public’s gaze toward advertisements and news headlines soon

permeated the literary domain, wherein the search for extraordinary and exotic

experience invariably led authors and publishers back to the quintessential spectacle—

war. Indeed, the Civil War proved the ideal medium to capture the attention of the Gilded

Age audience for it both appealed to veterans, who thrilled to relive what was for many

the most exciting, if traumatic, years of their lives, and to the youth of the upcoming

generation, for whom the war was a strange specter—at once both familiar and foreign.

Accordingly, the literature of the period endeavored to resurrect the lingering

shade of the Civil War. While John Esten Cooke published highly romanticized portraits

of war which invoked the cavalier mythos, Ambrose Bierce (Tales of Soldier and Civilian

1891) and Joseph Kirkland (The Captain of Company K 1891) provided more realistic, if

somewhat morbid, depictions of battle. Likewise, factual accounts of the great struggle

abounded; most notable were General Grant’s Personal Memoirs (1885-6), an enormous

success which eventually became one of the most popular books of the Gilded Age, and

the U.S. War Department’s 128 volume series War of the Rebellion: Official Records of

the Union and Confederate Armies (disseminated to libraries throughout the United

States in 1882) (McConnell 168). Similarly, George Lemon’s National Tribune and

numerous monthly magazines such as Century, Harper’s, and The Atlantic ran frequent

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features examining and interpreting various battles (McConnell 168, Lentz 15). Perhaps

the most famous of these war memorandum, however, was Century Magazine’s three

years series entitled “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” (1884-87) which provided

both a pictorial and a written record of the struggle based on first hand accounts of

soldiers and observations of war artists. Not only was this project a commercial

success—doubling the magazine’s circulation and selling over 75,000 copies when it was

published in book form in 1888—but, as the first attempt to assemble a cumulative

pictorial history of the war, it had enormous historical value as well (Sears 12). While on

one level this compilation of data and images preserved the memory of the war for future

generations, it also fulfilled another purpose—that of providing city dwellers an escape

from the monotony and passivity of urban life into the thrilling campaigns of an earlier

age.

This revival of interest in the Civil War was further accelerated by the influence

of veterans’ organizations and the martial and nationalistic atmosphere of the 1880s and

90s. While the years directly following the war were distinguished by an uncanny silence

as veterans and civilians alike attempted to return to normality and appeared to consign

all memory of the five-year struggle to the past, the last two decades of the nineteenth

century were characterized by a retrospective gaze as the Civil War once again rose to the

forefront of the nation’s collective consciousness. During this period, membership in

veterans’ organizations peaked—for example, the Grand Army of the Republic, the

largest of such associations, reached 400,000—and tributes to soldiers, both the surviving

and the fallen, penetrated nearly every sphere of society and included “syrupy odes

(“Cover Them Over with Beautiful Flowers”), war dramas (“The Drummer Boy of

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Shiloh”), war lectures, war memoirs, Memorial Day orations and monuments erected by

adoring towns” (McConnell 167). Similarly, veteran’s organizations provided a forum in

which war illustrations could be displayed and discussed and sponsored military reunions

which attracted thousands of participants by offering a temporary recreation of camp life

(McConnell 206, 175).

This celebration of its martial history was paralleled by a burgeoning sense of

nationalism as the United States sought opportunities to further its interests abroad.

Though a visible emblem of the nation since the Revolutionary War, it was not until the

close of the 19th century that the American flag was translated into an object of ritual and

employed as a “symbol of abstract nationalism” (McConnell 230). Similarly, these years

witnessed the conception and institution of the Pledge of Allegiance and the increased

popularity of “The Star Spangled Banner.” The ramifications of this flourishing

nationalism, which was invariably accompanied by an elevation of earlier military

achievements, were particularly evident in the international arena and resulted in a

number of foreign disputes. John Higham references the United States’ proclivity toward

international entanglements during this formative period in its history in his essay “The

Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s” : “the sorrow and weariness left by the

Civil War had passed; jingoism and a deliberate cultivation of the military virtues ensued.

The United States picked quarrels with Italy, Chile, and Great Britain before it found a

satisfactory target in the liberation of Cuba. A steady build-up of naval power

accompanied these crises” (31).

While the popular press frequently aligned these international ventures and the

conflicts arising from them with the Civil War, the variances between these disparate

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military operations were numerous. The most significant disparity, for the purpose of

this study, can be observed in the differing manners in which these conflicts were

represented. While the former was fought by Americans on American soil, the latter

exploits were conducted in distant lands against unknown adversaries. Whereas accurate

and realistic reporting characterized the American Civil War, exaggeration,

embellishment and the tendency to cast the opponent in the role of exotic other defined

the latter endeavors—in essence, war had been transformed from a desperate struggle to

maintain national unity, into a demonstration of military might for the appeasement of the

masses at home who exhibited an insatiable appetite for spectacle.

A final cultural transformation which occurred during this era, and one that seems

to have influenced Crane’s decision to represent war as a dramatic public display of

violence, was the rapid growth of spectator sports, particularly football and boxing

(Higham 28). In his expose of American culture, Trachtenburg describes this era as “the

first age of modern mass-spectator sports, of professional and collegiate games witnessed

in stadiums by thousands of seated onlookers” (123). For the purpose of this study, the

growth and promotion of football is of particular interest. Renowned for its violence and

ferocity—the intercollegiate season of 1905 witnessed eighteen deaths and over one

hundred and fifty serious injuries—the football field was often aligned with the

battlefield (Brown 291). Combat imagery was frequently employed by reporters to

describe the sport which the Nation in 1905 condemned as a “public spectacle of brutality,

for glory and gate-money” (Brown 127, 291). Yet, instead of repelling potential

spectators, these critical reviews merely increased its popularity for, in some strange way,

the violence of the game appears to have satisfied the need for spectacle while

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simultaneously offering the glimpse of war which the public so desperately desired.

Popular opinion regarding the game is perhaps best encapsulated by Crane himself, who

in a letter to John Northern Hilliard, declared, “Of course, I have never been in a battle,

but I believe that I got my sense of rage of conflict on the football field…”(Crane,

Correspondence 322).

From within this evolutionary period in American history, The Red Badge of

Courage would emerge in 1894. Composed primarily during the author’s three year

residency in the bustling metropolis of New York City, a focal point of cultural

transformation, the novel is, in many ways, a reflection of its turbulent social milieu. In

particular, the reader will observe the protagonist’s proclivity to view images as objects

of consumption, the narrator’s tendency to portray battle as spectacle or demonstration,

and the author’s recurring references to sports/spectator imagery. While Crane’s reliance

on the Century magazine series “Battles and Leaders” has been verified by Corwin

Knapp Linson, a friend of Crane’s who owned the collection, and R. G. Vosburgh, a

member of the Art Student’s League and roommate of the novelist, the influence of the

other forces mentioned above, while perhaps more subtle, were nonetheless equally

pervasive (Sorrentino and Wertheim 89).

From the opening pages of The Red Badge, the reader is immediately immersed in

a world of pictures and picturing. For example, in his description of the youth’s bivouac,

the narrator mentions that “a picture from an illustrated weekly was upon the log walls”

(Crane 4). Similarly, Henry’s rationale for enlisting derives from romanticized portraits

of war, which, while apparently based on illustrations from the weekly newspapers, have

been embellished and glorified by the youth’s active imagination: “He had read of

19

marches, sieges, conflicts, and he had longed to see it all. His busy mind had drawn for

him large pictures extravagant in color, lurid with breathless deeds…The newspapers, the

gossip of the village, his own picturing, had aroused him to an uncheckable degree”

(Crane 5). These notions of heroism and triumph on the field of battle are reinforced

later in the novel when the narrator allows the reader access to Henry’s deluded fantasies:

Swift pictures of himself, apart, yet in himself, came to him—a blue desperate figure leading lurid charges with one knee forward and a broken blade high—a blue, determined figure standing before a crimson assault, getting calmly killed on a high place before the eyes of all…Indeed, he saw a picture of himself, dust-stained, haggard, panting, flying to the front at the proper moment to seize and throttle the dark, leering witch of calamity. (Crane 51) [emphasis mine here and in all subsequent quotations]

Akin to the images projected by the Edison Kinetograph, an early motion picture device

which was a popular feature of penny-arcades in the 1890s, the merit of these “swift

pictures” seems to rest in their entertainment value—a strange and somewhat troubling

revelation (Haliburton 124).

While one might be tempted to argue that this inclination to view war as a series

of idealized pictures is merely a means of displaying a new recruit’s inexperience and

naiveté which will soon be replaced by the more realistic perspective of a participant, the

reader will observe that this substitution never actually takes place. In fact, very little

changes between the parade of images which pass before Henry’s inner eye at the

beginning of the narrative and the procession of pictures which flash before his psyche in

the wake of the first skirmish and again at the novel’s close. Having finally regained his

regiment after his frenzied flight from battle the previous day, Henry, reviewing “the

pictures he had seen,” feels “competent to return home and make the hearts of the people

glow warm with stories of war” (Crane 69). Likewise, in the final chapter, the youth,

20

recollecting his behavior while under enemy fire, likens it to a grand pageant of military

achievement:

At last they marched before him clearly. From his present view point he was enabled to look upon them in spectator fashion and to criticize them with some correctness, for his new condition had already defeated certain sympathies. Regarding his procession of memory he felt gleeful and unregretting, for in it his public deeds were paraded in great and shining prominence. Those performances which had been witnessed by his fellows marched now in wide purple and gold, having various defections. They went gayly with music. It was a pleasure to watch these things.” (Crane 102)

Clearly, Henry’s war experiences have had small effect on his conception of war or his

relationship to it. Even after having actively participated in two engagements, he still

views himself primarily as a spectator of his own “performances.”

When viewed in conjunction with the pictures/picturing motif, this inability to

move from the role of spectator to that of active participant may, in fact, be a reflection of

the author’s own experience with war or, in this case, his lack thereof. Having never

actually witnessed battle, Crane was completely reliant, from a visual point of view, on

the pictorial record of Civil War, and was therefore, inevitably relegated to the role of

spectator. For him, accessing war was indeed a process of picturing, and therefore, it

should come as no great surprise that his protagonist holds a similar view of reality.

While the fact that Crane spent countless hours in the studio of fellow artist

Corwin Knapp Linson poring over illustrated magazines detailing Civil War battles has

been well established, few have investigated the impact these pictures had on the

narrative of The Red Badge. In his reevaluation of Stephen Crane, Robert Stallman

writes, “Instead of panoramic views of a battlefield, Crane paints not the whole scene but

disconnected segments of it, which, accurately enough, is all that a participant in an

21

action or a spectator of a scene can possibly take into his view at any one moment”

(Stallman 252). Of the visual material available to the author, the work of the Civil War

sketch artists, much of which was reproduced in “Battles and Leaders,” is the medium

which most closely resembles the style of disjointed snapshots described by Stallman.

While photography also influenced the novel—a topic which will be addressed in a

subsequent chapter—the drawings of sketch artists were the only form of media capable

of capturing motion, and therefore would have provided the optimal resource for the

young author desirous to look on war and display it.

Indeed, when the drawings of these war artists are juxtaposed with descriptive

passages from The Red Badge, startling similarities begin to emerge. Prior to examining

the pictures themselves, however, several parallels in subject and style should be noted.

Unlike the artists of earlier wars, who were often hired post facto by wealthy patrons to

paint romanticized battle scenes celebrating the heroic acts of gallant officers, this new

generation of artists drew many of their pictures on site and focused primarily on the

plight of the common soldier. Panoptic scenes were often replaced by narrower views

limited to a single individual’s field of vision. In the place of heroic charges and glorious

victories, these artists chose to depict the chaos and confusion of the battlefield. Rough

and often lacking in detail, due to the turbulent conditions of their composition, these

sketches nevertheless sought to achieve a degree of realism that was unprecedented in the

genre of war paintings.

Likewise, the characters in Crane’s novel represent the common man: a point

emphasized by the author’s use of descriptive epithets—the “tall soldier,” “the loud

soldier,” “the ragged soldier,”—in the place of proper names. In regard to these

22

appellations, Stallman writes, “the persons in his fiction are not persons but just

Everyman—the synthetic figures of a Morality Play or a medieval tapestry, the typical

representatives of a group” (248). Additionally, the protagonist exhibits a severely

limited scope of vision which is further obstructed by smoke and debris. The effects of

this restricted point of view can be observed in Henry’s frustration with the seeming

inefficiency of the army, his animosity toward the apparently inane orders of

commanding officers, and his disoriented behavior under fire. Finally, The Red Badge

resembles a drawing in the author’s attention to positioning and posture, two stylistic

devices examined in detail by David Halliburton in The Color of the Sky: “Crane’s novel,

it will be seen, is very much a positing affair, producing a wide range of positions,

placements, loci, attitudes, poses and postures—a cartography whose coordinates provide

a kind of infrastructure of the narrative. Which is not to say that the positing is static. Its

function is to orient, and the orientation is itself dynamic” (Halliburton 117). Analogous

to the work of the sketch artists, Crane’s descriptions stress placement and demeanor not

for the purpose of spotlighting heroic scenes but rather in an effort to undermine the very

ideology of heroism:

There was a singular absence of heroic poses. The men bending and surging in their haste and rage were in every impossible attitude. The steel ramrods clanked and clanged with incessant din as the men pounded them furiously into hot rifle barrels. The flaps of the cartridge boxes were unfastened, and bobbed idiotically with each movement…The officers, at their intervals, rearward, neglected to stand in picturesque attitudes.” (Crane 29)

On Crane’s battlefield, mayhem reigns and affords little opportunity for heroics.

Although one-to-one correspondences between specific sketches and particular

passages in the novel are difficult, if not impossible, to establish, many of Crane’s scenes

23

appear to have relied heavily on the pictorial archive. One such example can be found in

his description of Henry’s first encounter with war:

The men dropped here and there like bundles. The captain of the youth’s company had been killed in an early part of the action. His body lay stretched out in the position of a tired man resting, but upon his face there was an astonished and sorrowful look, as if he thought some friend had done him an ill turn. The babbling man was grazed by a shot that made the blood stream widely down his face. He clapped both hands to his head. (Crane 29)

When the above quotation is aligned with Allen Redwood’s drawing, “Steuart’s Brigade

at Culp’s Hill,” [Plate 1] the reader will note a number of parallels. From the “tired man

resting” in the foreground to the soldier who has been grazed in the head on the right

hand side, this picture, like Crane’s passage, individualizes each casualty and thereby

conveys the human cost of war. In

addition to personalizing loss, pictures

such as these enable the reader/viewer to

acquire a mental image of war without

ever having experienced it. Though a

dwindling number of readers in the

1890s would have actually heard the roar

of battle or seen its carnage, all could

relate to the imagery of bundles falling

or men sleeping.

Plate 1

Plate 2

Another image which bears a

striking similarity to Crane’s depiction

of battle is William Sheppard’s drawing,

24

“Under Fire at Chancellorsville” [Plate 2]. This rendering, which depicts Union soldiers

taking shelter behind dirt fortifications, presents a brutally realistic portrayal of war. On

the left hand side of the drawing, exhausted solders seek refuge behind an earthen

barricade while an irate officer upbraids a small group of men who have turned their

backs on the battlefield. Absorbed in this mini-drama, the regiment fails to notice the

tragedy occurring in its midst: on the right side of the canvas, their comrade reels to the

ground after having been mortally wounded by an artillery shell. The detachment and

lack of sensitivity displayed by the soldiers’ in this picture can easily be aligned with that

exemplified by Henry and his comrades, who having grown accustomed to the

“sputtering of muskets” and the continual boom of the cannons, “cuddle” into the damp

trenches and, turning their backs on the theatre of war, quickly fall asleep (Crane 70). A

corollary to the battle scenes which frame them, these moments of respite are equally

important to the reader/viewer in that they enable him/her to observe the psychological

damage wrought by war.

A third parallel can be observed in Crane’s depictions of batteries in action:

“Through the trees he watched the black figures of the gunners as they worked swiftly

and intently…Once he saw a tiny battery go dashing along the line of the horizon. The

tiny riders were beating tiny horses” (Crane 30). The flurry of activity witnessed here is

equally visible in Edwin Forbes’s

rendering of gunners at Chancellorsville

in “Meeting Jackson’s Flank Attack,”

[Plate 3] and Walton Tabor’s portrait of

a frantic battery gaining the field in

Plate 3

25

“Going into Action under Fire” [Plate 4]. Visualizing violent displays of motion and

energy, these animated scenes convey the sense of exhilaration and urgency experienced

by troops in battle.

cklessly across the broken and

In addition to communicating the

thrill of battle, Crane equally seeks to

reveal the terror felt by soldiers when

confronted with their own mortality.

This panic is clearly seen in chapter

fourteen when the regiment is ordered to

charge across an open field: “the men of the regiment, with their starting eyes and

sweating faces, running madly, or falling, as if thrown headlong, to queer, heaped-up

corpses…But there was a frenzy made from this furious rush. The men, pitching forward

insanely, had burst into cheerings, moblike and barbaric, but tuned in strange keys that

could arouse the dullard and the stoic” (Crane 82). Though the locale of Walton Taber’s

illustration, “Union Charge through a Cornfield,” [Plate 5] differs from that described by

Crane, the emotional landscape is much the same. In both depictions, havoc reigns as

soldiers, blinded by their own fears, lunge forward re

Plate 4

corpse strewn ground.

Plate 5 While some passages, such as the

one provided above, employ multiple senses,

others dwell primarily on the ocular,

depicting war as an awesome yet awful

display of graphic images. One such

26

moment occurs when a shell falls into the midst of the charging regiment: “The song of

bullets was in the air and shells snarled among the treetops. One tumbled directly into

the middle of a hurrying group and exploded in crimson fury. There was an instant’s

spectacle of a man, almost over it, throwing up his hands to shield his eyes. Other men,

punched by bullets, fell in grotesque agonies. The regiment left a coherent trail of

bodies” (Crane 82). The horror evoked by this transitory vision is similarly realized in

Henri Lovie’s sketch, “Battle of Munfordville, Kentucky,” [Plate 6] which mercilessly

n

of the novel when the

regiment attem

them, overcome them with fatal fascination. They stared woodenly at the sights, and, lowering their eyes, looked from face to face. (Crane 83)

depicts the aftereffects of a shell’s explosio .

While death is an ever-present reality on

the battlefield, the brutality of this picture,

in which the soldiers’ bodies are blasted

back upon the viewer, inevitably appalls the

onlooker, whose gaze is both attracted and

repelled by the scene’s violence. While

such glimpses absorb the attention of the viewer, they equally arrest it. Crane manifests

the hypnotic and stupefying power of the spectacle in the latter part

Plate 6

pts to charge across an open field:

The men, halted, had opportunity to see some of their comrades dropping with moans and shrieks. A few lay under foot, still wailing. And now for an instant the men stood, their rifles slack in their hands, and watched the regiment dwindle. They appeared dazed and stupid. This spectacle seemed to paralyze

27

Overwhelmed by a barrage of terrifying impressions, these soldiers are completely

incapacitated. The reader, by proxy, is similarly transfixed, captivated by the vibrant

imagery of death.

These last two scenes reveal yet another resemblance between the pictorial

and author cho

writes,

. d aesthetically. As

contemporary reviewers were quick to notice, Crane’ s style turned war

midst of mad cries, explosions, smoke, raw violence, and bloodshed. That

anyway sensory experience, as a combination of sense impressions which

Gilded Age consumed the yellow journalism of

Pulitze

representations of war and Crane’s descriptive renderings of combat in that both artist

ose to portray war as spectacle. In regard to this tendency, Giogio Mariani

What this representative strategy actually achieves is a recreation of war as pure spectacle, as exotic imagery to be consume

into a real thing and placed the reader directly on the battleground in the

is, Crane recreated war, as far as that is possible verbally, as a cinematic or

shock and nearly hypnotize the reader. (Mariani 158)

In the same way that the audience of the

r and Hearst, it quickly availed itself of the vicarious experience of war provided

by The Red Badge, partaking of the spectacle of battle in much the same way it devoured

the popular entertainments of the day.

Given his reliance on the illustrations of Civil War sketch artists, it is not

surprising that Crane would choose to emphasize the visual dimension of battle. Indeed,

his prose is imbued with references to “seeing,” “looking,” “watching,” and “observing.”

This attention to the optical is particularly evident in the soldiers’ desire to see war. As

the new regiment prepares to enter the foray on the first day of battle, the narrator states,

“The greater part of the untested men appeared quiet and absorbed. They were going to

look at war, the red animal—war, the blood-swollen god” (Crane 20). Moreover, though

Henry flees from the lines during the first engagement with the “zeal of an insane

28

sprinter,” he soon finds himself drawn back to the scene of battle: “A certain mothlike

quality within him kept him in the vicinity of the battle. He had a great desire to see, and

to get news” (Crane 52). The author’s propensity to employ a vocabulary of visual

descriptors is manifested again later in the novel when, during a brief pause in the

fighting, the youth once more assumes the position of observer: “He stood erect and

tranquil, watching the attack begin against a part of the lines that made a blue curve along

the side of an adjacent hill. His vision being unmolested by smoke from the rifles of his

companions, he had opportunities to see parts of the hard fight” (Crane 93). Instead of

decreasing as the soldiers are caught up within the melee and transformed from viewers

into participants, the number of optic verbs only increases: “The youth, in his leapings,

saw as through a mist, a picture of four or five men stretched upon the ground or writhing

upon their knees…tottering among them was the rival color bearer, whom the youth saw

had been bitten vitally by the bullets of the last formidable volley. He perceived the man

fighting a last struggle” (Crane 99). The level of detail and degree of clarity contained

within these observances lead one to question the reliability of the narrator. Are these

truly the fleeting impressions of a soldier in the midst of battle or are they instead the

calm reflections of a spectator?

The claim that the youth’s/narrator’s descriptions align more closely with the

experience of the spectator than that of the soldier is substantiated by a number of

passages throughout The Red Badge in which the soldier is cast in a spectatorial role. As

the firing commences, Henry’s gaze is captured by the events unfolding before him: “A

brigade ahead of them and on the right went into action…The youth, forgetting his neat

plan of getting killed, gazed spell bound. His eyes grew wide and busy with the action of

29

the scene. His mouth was a little was open” (Crane 23). Likewise, by assuming the

position of color bearer, the youth is freed from the responsibilities of a typical soldier

and provided the opportunity to give full reign to his voyeuristic fantasies. In reference

to his bizarre behavior, the narrator writes, “The youth, still the bearer of the colors, did

not feel his idleness. He was deeply absorbed as a spectator. The crash and swing of the

great drama made him lean forward, intent-eyed, his face working in small contortions.

Sometimes he prattled, words coming unconsciously from his grotesque exclamations”

(Crane 95). Neither is Henry the only character to be treated as a spectator; at several

points in the novel, the entire regiment assumes this status. One such revelatory

occurrence follows Henry’s maniacal performance on the field: “He turned then and,

pausing

icarious experience of the author,

which

with his rifle thrown half into position, looked at the blue line of his comrades.

During this moment of leisure they seemed all to be engaged in staring with astonishment

at him. They had become spectators” (Crane 76).

The recurrence of the spectatorship motif, whether in the form of Henry’s

irrational desire to see battle or the regiment’s absurd attempts to comprehend war by

gawking at the half-crazed behavior of a “war god,” reflects a larger theme of mediation

which surfaces repeatedly throughout the novel. While the youth’s regiment does

eventually have an immediate experience with war, the author/narrators decision to

continue this stylistic device throughout and following their encounter with the “blood-

swollen god,” seems to speak more to the factors surrounding the novel’s conception than

to the soldiers’ degree of experience. In this case, the v

was mediated both by sketch artists, who were themselves spectators, and by

30

illustrators/engravers, who often manipulated the artwork prior to publication, gives rise

to a singular voyeurism on the part of the characters.

The audience/performance dichotomy is further developed through Crane’s

references to “the blue demonstration,” an expressive term which, for the reader of the

1890s, would inevitably have evoked the memories of military pageantry such as the

Grand Review, the Union Army’s triumphant parade through Washington in May of

1865 (Crane 11). Yet, a careful analysis of this motif will disclose that the author was

not content merely to relegate the soldier to the role of spectator but rather complicated

the position of these combatants by treating them as viewers one moment and actors the

next. W

rrator likens him to a

footbal

hile in one passage he refers to the veteran regiment as an “audience,” in the next,

he aligns the battlefield with a theatre and the soldiers with actors: “The men saw the

ground vacant of fighters. It would have been an empty stage if it were not for a few

corpses that lay thrown and twisted into fantastic shaped upon the sward” (Crane 26, 89).

In addition to comparing his characters to performers, the author often identifies

them with competitors in sporting events. Containing a number of allusions to a variety

of spectator sports, including track, wrestling, boxing, and football, the text repeatedly

conflates the soldier and the athlete. For example, as the regiment prepares to charge

across an open field, the men are compared to sprinters waiting for a signal (Crane 80).

Similarly, as the youth hurries to the safety of the forest, the na

l payer (Crane 84). Finally, when the blue and gray regiments collide, they are

said to have “exchanged blows in the manner of a pair of boxers” (Crane 88). Through

this conflux of sports metaphors, Crane effectively reiterates the spectator/spectacle

theme and reconstructs war as a vehicle of popular entertainment.

31

Thus, Crane’s book marks a radical metamorphosis in the genre of the war novel.

With its emphasis on sport and spectacle, vicariousness and voyeurism, immediacy and

mediation, The Red Badge persuasively re-envisions history, transforming artistic

depictions of the Civil War into the graphic display of violence desired by the audience

of the 1890s. Through its rich and evocative visual imagery, the novel captivates its

readers, transforming them, like the characters who reside within its pages, into

spectators of the one great tragedy—war.

32

CHAPTER 2

PHOTOGRAPHIC REALISM AND THE CORPSE DISPLAYED

Since its publication in October of 1895, The Red Badge of Courage has been widely

celebrated for its stark photographic realism, particularly its graphic images of battle’s

aftermath. Highlighting the author’s attention to minute detail and the fragmented and

episodic nature of the narrative, critics and scholars alike have commented on the

distinctly photographic quality of the novel. For example, in his 1896 review, Harold

Frederic likened the young author to “a Muybridge, with an instantaneous camera,” and

in so doing, effectively aligned Crane’s innovative writing style with the photographic

exploits of Eadweard Muybridge, an English-born photographer renowned for his

stereoscopic photographs of animals in motion (119). By juxtaposing photographer and

author, Frederic intimates that, just as Muybridge, through a series of sequential images

taken at split-second intervals, was able to disclose the actual movements of a galloping

horse, so Crane, through vibrant “photographic revelation,” is able to reveal the true face

of war in all its terrible glory (119).

This second chapter will seek to establish the relationship between the photographic

archive of Civil War images, the pastoral/sacred martyr narrative which developed

around it, and the descriptions of death and debris littered throughout Crane’s novel.

Though Roger Fenton, a British photographer, had taken several hundred pictures of the

Crimean War (1853-6), the American Civil War marked the earliest large-scale effort to

comprehensively document a military campaign using a photographic medium. Likewise,

33

this conflict denoted the first time the human cost of war—visible in the Matthew

Brady’s and Alexander Gardener’s depictions of corpses and mutilated bodies—had been

exposed to the mechanical and indifferent eye of the camera. Confronted with these

grisly images, pictures which would have been censored in all subsequent conflicts,

Northern publishers and photographers felt compelled to create a narrative to justify these

portraits of violence and carnage. By surrounding the disturbing views with scenes of

rustic harmony and passages of pastoral prose, these individuals and their correlates in

the Gilded Age sought to recreate the battlefield as a sacred landscape and elevate the

dead Union soldier to the status of martyr. Similarly, by adding captions to these

photographs, crafting extended metaphors and romanticized vignettes to accompany them,

and assembling the photographs into organized collections, advocates of the Union were

able to incorporate these images into a coherent narrative and, by subsuming the

individual parts to the whole, divest the scenes of their horror. By employing the pastoral

motif throughout the novel, Crane effectively recalls the pictographic record and its

corresponding narrative only to highlight the latter’s inadequacy. Instead of conveying

the content of the images in a muted and palatable form, as Gardner does in his Sketch

Book, Crane chooses to depict them with unmitigated veracity. Against the backdrop of

pastoral violation and renewal, the author fashions a tableau of death which is neither

sacred nor glorious nor rational, but rather anguished, appalling and utterly

incomprehensible. Thus, by translating these photographic renderings of the battlefield

into a written text, Crane effectively resurrects the corpse of the Civil War soldier and

reverses the trend toward effacement which a nation, eager to forget the tragedies of the

past, had attempted to instate.

34

The years directly preceding the Civil War were a time of rapid technological

development in the field of photography. In 1855, the traditional copper-based

daguerreotype was replaced by the ambrotype (an image on glass), a medium which was

quickly supplanted by the tintype (image on a thin piece of iron), and finally, displaced

by the paper photograph in 1858/9 (Zeller 14-5). These evolutions in the development

process resulted in a much higher degree of efficiency and economy. Likewise, the year

1860 saw the production and introduction of the first inexpensive stereoscope, a picture

viewing device which superimposed two identical images in order to recreate the

semblance of depth. This pioneering mechanism and the 3-D viewing experience it

provided quickly gained popularity, especially following the introduction of the paper

photograph which afforded the ideal medium for stereographic cards. The impact of this

device can be observed firsthand in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous essay, “The

Stereoscope and the Stereograph” (1859), wherein he declares,

Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped…Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. (747)

Holmes further posits that, having discovered a means of capturing form and divorcing it

from matter, the next generation would begin collecting these numerous forms or

photographs and arranging them in massive libraries (“Stereoscope” 748). Finally, he

closes his essay with the prophetic and, when viewed retrospectively, slightly ominous

declaration that “the next European war will send us stereographs of battles…The time is

perhaps at hand when a flash of light, as sudden and brief as that of the lightning which

shows a whirling wheel standing stock still, shall preserve the very instant of the shock of

35

contact of the mighty armies that are even now gathering” (Holmes, “Stereoscope” 748).

Little did Holmes know that it was not a European battleground that would become the

next subject of the camera’s scrutiny, but a distinctively American conflict in which the

bodies of dead American soldiers on American soil would be the objects of speculation.

The advent of hostilities in 1861 increased rather than decreased the public

demand for photography as thousands of soldiers posed for portraits before setting off for

the grand adventure of war. These cartes-de-viste, small pictures fixed to pieces of

cardboard, were so popular that scholars estimate that large companies, such as New

York’s E. and H.T. Anthony, may have “produced as many as 3,600 cartes-de-viste per

day during the war” (Sweet 81). In addition to portraiture, many Civil War

photographers, such as Matthew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan and

George Bernard, hoped to create a photographic record of the war itself. Due to the

constraints of wet plate photography, this ambitious project was primarily limited to

static objects; hence, instead of rendering the battles themselves, the camera depicted

their aftermaths—corpses, dead horses, broken war machines, and blackened ruins

(Trachtenburg 72). Rather than fulfilling the part of on-site reporter, the photographer

assumed the role of historian, piecing together the events of the past to form a holistic,

albeit fragmented, account of battle. Anthony Lee, in his article entitled “The Image of

War,” affirms the retrospective nature of photography during this era: “the camera

pictured not events but instead only the sites and remains of events already passed; it

registered, mostly by implication and imaginative reconstruction (and through the

services of the letterpress), the marks of history; and it everywhere betrayed its own

belatedness” (Lee 29). Despite the camera’s limitations, Harper’s Magazine and Leslie’s

36

Illustrated News did purchase some of the photographs which they subsequently used as

the basis for woodblock engravings (Sweet 84). Battle scenes in the form of stereograph

views and framed prints were also displayed in individual galleries and sold to the public

at relatively low prices. Gardner’s catalog, “Photographic Incidents of War,” (1863)

which contained 572 photographs, 407 of which were stereograph cards priced at fifty

cents a piece, clearly speaks to the popular appeal of these images (Zeller 18). A final

vehicle through which Civil War photographs were circulated was in the form of large,

photographic books such as Gardner’s two-volume Photographic Sketch Book of the

Civil War (1866) and George Barnard’s Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign

(1866). Since a means of mechanical reproduction had not yet been discovered, these

photographic collections were composed entirely of positives and, consequently, were too

expensive to be mass marketed.

Though the demand for Civil War photographs temporarily abated in the 1870s, it

resurfaced in the 1880 and 90s as the public, having acquired a degree of distance from

the tragedy, gazed on it with newfound curiosity and collectively sought to imbue it with

an added layer of significance which would be applicable to the challenges confronting

an imperialist nation. During this period, Hartford and Taylor, a large Connecticut-based

firm, began marketing a collection of 225 stereograph cards depicting a variety of Civil

War images. In addition to these views, the company sold sets of stereopticon slides

which were accompanied by descriptive texts and projected on blank screens for large

audiences (Zeller 18, Trachtenburg 77). Improvements in the printing process during the

1880s also ushered in the era of the printed photograph and allowed for the publication of

The Memorial War Book (1890), a documentary text which included over two thousand

37

photographs (Zeller 19). Given the abundance of photographic material treating the Civil

War available in New York City during the 1890s, and Crane’s sustained interest in

images and texts dealing with the national struggle, one can only presume that the

photographic archive—in the form of one or more of these media—made a distinct

impression on the young author, an assumption supported by the text of The Red Badge.

The public’s fascination with images of conflict takes on new meaning when one

considers that these were not merely views of campsites and empty battlefields but

graphic pictures of bloody, bloated corpses and the stiffened carcasses of horses. A

reflection of the culture’s desire for spectacle, this morbid curiosity can be traced back to

Gardner’s ground-breaking coverage of the Antietam battlefield. The site of twenty-six

thousand casualties in a single day, Antietam will forever be remembered as “the single

bloodiest day in American history” (Williams 70). Moreover, this battle, which occurred

on September 1, 1862, marked the first time the dead themselves were brought into focus.

While the images which resulted shocked and appalled American audiences, they

effectively captured the public’s attention and brought Gardner, and subsequently Brady,

his employer at the time, a great deal of publicity and eventually a significant profit. Thus,

the American people’s desire to comprehend death and mortality prevailed over their

strict sense of propriety and their desire to respect the honored dead. This strange fixation

is especially apparent in a New York Times article dated October 20, 1862 which explores

the bizarre effect the Antietam pictures had on the citizens of the large metropolis:

Of all the objects of horror, one would think the battle-field stand preeminent, that it should bear away the palm of repulsiveness. But on the contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes him loth to leave them. You will see hushed, revered groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to

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look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in the dead men’s eyes. (“Brady’s Photographs” 5)

These words are similarly echoed by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his essay “Doings of the

Sunbeam” (1863), wherein he encourages those who desire to comprehend the severity of

the calamity to gaze upon the images exhibited in Brady’s gallery: “Let him who wishes

to know what war is look at this series of illustrations. These wrecks of manhood thrown

together in careless heaps or ranged in ghastly rows for burial were alive but yesterday”

(11). Drawing from his own impressions of Antietam—he witnessed the battleground in

later October of 1862 while in search of his wounded son—Holmes continues, “It was so

nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited

by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came

back to us” (“Doings” 12). With this statement, the writer acknowledges the disturbing

voyeurism engendered by these macabre war photographs, which vividly recreate the

battlefield post-conflict and place the viewer, not in the midst of the action, but in its

wake, in a charnel house where the dead keep silent sentry.

The barrage of grisly war photographs, which began with Gardner’s work at

Antietam and continued through the signing of the peace treaty at Appomattox, quickly

inundated the nation’s visual culture and posed a significant dilemma for Northern

publishers, photographers and writers who sought to garner support for the Union and

validate the seemingly senseless slaughter. Fearing that the violence of the images when

viewed in conjunction with the fragmentary nature of the photographic record would

cause previously loyal citizens to question the Northern cause, these individuals sought to

integrate the isolated photographs into a larger structure with a clearly defined telos

which would then function regressively to imbue each image with a distinct sense of

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purpose. To further this end, many stereograph views were sold in ordered sets “the

number and caption printed on the back linking the scene to an implied narrative of the

whole” (Trachtenburg 93). Likewise, war albums, such as Gardner’s Sketch Book, sought

to integrate the isolated prints into a totalizing structure. In regard to this trend, Alan

Trachtenburg, in his chapter “Images of War,” writes, “Viewed at random, images lose

their power to speak, except inchoately, like the sense-defying experience of battle itself.

Organized into a catalogue or sequence, single images can be viewed as part of a

presumed pattern, an order, a historical totality” (88). Therefore, by carefully numbering

and arranging photographs, advocates of the Union attempted to find unity in

fragmentation and thereby exchange futility for fulfillment.

Crane’s portrayal of the corpse throughout The Red Badge appears in direct

contradiction to the ordered, logical progression of images proffered by collections of

stereographic cards and war albums. Though the narrative itself is carefully crafted, the

appearances of the dead seem to be aberrant and haphazard. Materializing suddenly

before Henry and the reader, these death studies have much the same effect as

photographs—rendering fragmented, inchoate portraits of war’s wreckage. Engendering

feelings of shock and horror while simultaneously denying readers access to a historical

continuum, which might imply continuity and a subsequent theme of coherence, these

disjointed snapshots resist integration, existing instead as isolated depictions of mortality

which vanish as swiftly as they appeared.

In addition to organizing war views into ordered configurations, Northern

publishers and photographers sought to craft a narrative which would valorize the fallen

while simultaneously legitimizing the Union for which they so nobly gave their lives. In

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order to achieve this end, a new rhetoric was developed in which the Northern dead were

transformed into heroic martyrs who had selflessly surrendered everything, even their

very lives, to preserve national unity. The New York Times article previously discussed

entitled “Brady’s Photographs; Pictures of the Dead at Antietam” clearly reflects this

attempt to portray the Union soldiers as sacrificial, Christ-like figures when it states,

“Here lie men who have not hesitated to seal and stamp their conviction with their

blood—men who have flung themselves into the great gulf of the unknown to teach the

world that there are truths dearer that life, wrongs and shames more to be dreaded than

death… reserved for him a crown which only heroes and martyrs are permitted to wear”

(5). Holmes equally invokes this Biblical allusion when he declares, “Yet through such

martyrdom comes our redemption” (“Doings” 12). An analysis of this emotive rhetoric

and the theodicy to which it subscribes reveals that, in order to justify the Northern cause,

these proponents of the Union attempted, not merely to sanctify the dead, but too

manipulated their images in order to forge a coherent, if highly partisan, narrative.

Literary critic Timothy Sweet addresses this issue when he states, “When the corpses of

soldiers were textually or visually represented within the scene of the landscape, they

became objects appropriated by the state no less than the land itself over which they

fought. The dead soldier—Northern or Southern—was the sign of an individual whose

autonomy was surrendered to the ideology of the Union” (105).

Another aspect of this cultural ideology, which flourished concurrent with the

sacred martyr mythos, was the conception of the United States as a hallowed and

sanctified land, a pastoral paradise of fertile fields, high mountains and rich valleys. In

accordance with this theme, Civil War photographers began to mimic the work of

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landscape artists, focusing on wide, panoptic views of the natural world. In reference to

this trend, Sweet states, “Civil War photography appealed to the repository of naturalized

ideological values contained in the American landscape aesthetic. These images

predicted that the destiny of the Union was inscribed on the face of the land itself” (85).

By surrounding the images of the dead with benign depictions of the pastoral countryside,

in its quiet harmony and natural beauty, Civil War photographers and publishers sought

to diminish the brutal realities of war (Sweet 85). Likewise, by emphasizing the

regenerative power of nature, the pastoral frame offered hope in the midst of death and

destruction (Williams 71). Portrayed as a peaceful and restorative force, nature was

frequently cast in opposition to the violence of modern warfare. Sympathetic to the

soldiers’ plight, nature offers a compassionate balm to the living and a quiet resting place

to the dead. These sentiments are particularly evident in the New York Times article

mentioned previously, wherein the author affirms, “And if there be on earth one spot

where the grass will grow greener than on another when the next Summer comes, where

the leaves of Autumn will drop more lightly when they fall like a benediction upon a

work completed and a promise fulfilled, it is these soldiers’ graves” (5). Thus, the

pastoral aesthetic and the benevolent portrait of nature which accompanied it became an

integral aspect of Civil War photography, demonstrating yet anther attempt to justify

war’s atrocity.

Once constructed, this narrative, which often took the form of captions, scripts

and brief descriptive vignettes, was quickly applied to the disturbing war scenes

displayed in spectrograph views, stereopticon slides and photographic albums. While text

can imbue an image with greater meaning by “annexing movement or a sense of time to a

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frozen tableau,” as Jonathan Kamholtz asserts in his essay “Literature and Photography:

The Captioned Vision vs. The Firm Mechanical Impression,” it is more frequently used

to inscribe a photograph with ideological value. Though captions on Civil War pictures

served both functions, they often placed emphasis on the latter. Kamholtz further

contends that, “If captions attempt to transform photographs by adding the familiar

fictions of text to the apparently unfamiliar fictions of picture, it is presumably because

we distrust the raw, untransformed mechanical capacity of photography to capture the

tangible, rather than the spiritual, idealized world” (Kamholtz 394). Aware of the

damage their images could inflict if divorced from a larger narrative, photographers and

publishers were careful to circumscribe the corpse with carefully composed rhetoric. In

crafting these texts, however, they often re-wrote the pictures themselves, exchanging

harsh truths for romanticized imagery and substituting accuracy and authenticity for

sentimentality and euphemism. Bill Brown refers to this revisionist impulse when he

states that “the memory image and the photographic image are always incommensurable:

history must destroy the photograph because photography as such produces

countermemory” (147). Though unable and/or unwilling to destroy these images,

advocates of the Northern cause were quite successful in reinventing them.

Rejecting the impulse to rationalize or aestheticize the photographs of the dead by

projecting a pacifying narrative upon them, Crane, within the pages of The Red Badge,

deliberately returns to the detached image of the corpse, a decision which reflects an

inherent mistrust of language itself. Andrew Delbanco addresses this undercurrent in

Crane’s fiction in his essay “The American Stephen Crane: The Context of the Red

Badge of Courage” wherein he maintains that the young author viewed language as “a

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system of metaphoric deception” which “generates rather than records meaning” (69, 64).

According to this belief, language is never completely neutral—partial and biased, text,

whether in the form of captions or descriptive vignettes, functions as vehicle of

propaganda frequently employed by hegemonic powers to manipulate and control

popular opinion. Thus by eschewing the culturally constructed narrative, Crane attempts

to shed “the controlling assumptions about the meaning of what he sees” and attain an

“epistemological purity” which, if not completely neutral, would at least enable a more

impartial and dispassionate depiction of war (Delbanco 72).

Yet, this endeavor itself is highly ironical, for while the novelist might seek to

return to the unattended photograph, his creation must adopt the form of text and

therefore be deemed untrustworthy by the argument posed above. Bound to language as

a means of representation, the author has not replaced the linguistic with the pictorial but

merely exchanged one narrative for another. This paradoxical attempt to divorce the

image from the cultural mythology and the duplicitous language which upholds it, on the

one hand, and antithetically, employ language to create a neutral and accurate depiction

of war on the other, informs much of Crane’s novel. Prior to examining this

contradiction, however, one must first explore the form that the euphemistic narrative,

which Crane so adamantly sought to dismantle, assumed in post-Civil War America.

One photographic medium, which clearly exhibits both the organizational

structure and the sacred martyr/pastoral landscape narrative delineated above, is

Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War (1866). A

quintessential example of a photographic work which espouses the cultural constructions

regarding war, heroism, and sacrifice, Gardner’s Sketch Book offers the ideal

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counterpoint to Crane’s novel. After examining this album’s representation of war, this

chapter will proceed to compare/contrast Gardner and Crane’s treatment of Civil War

photography and the topos which surrounded it, focusing specifically on the latter’s

manipulation and eventual rejection of the popular mythos.

Gardner’s inclinations toward revisionism and romanticism, though subtle, are

quickly recognized by the trained eye. Hinted at both in the book’s title and in the

manner in which the photographer chooses to present his material, these cultural

constructs figuratively blur the images in their attempts to incorporate them into a larger

narrative. In her book, Though the Negative, Megan Rowley Williams reveals that, by

labeling his work a “sketch book” rather than an album, Gardner purposefully recalls “the

eighteenth-century tourist’s search for the picturesque and pastoral vistas to stimulate the

imagination” (54). Dating back to the roving treks of the British Romantic writers, such

as Wordsworth and Coleridge, the term “sketch book” was frequently used to describe

imaginative and creative endeavors instead of realistic or historical works (54). Similarly,

the presentational style of Gardner’s book, which, in the original version, placed the

written text on the page directly preceding the picture instead of on the page opposite it,

invested the written word with equal if not greater importance than the photographic

image (Young 54). Elizabeth Young comments on the effects of this stylistic decision in

her essay “Verbal Battlefields,” wherein she asserts that by positioning the picture and

the vignette on the rectos of consecutive pages, Gardner ensured that “each written text

had to be viewed independently, opposite white space” (54). Though the photographer

maintains in his preface that “Verbal representations of such places, or scenes, may or

may not have the merit of accuracy, but photographic presentments of them will be

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accepted by posterity with an undoubting faith,” he proceeds to contradict this statement

by elevating the text in respect to the photograph. Furthermore, by placing the text before

the image, instead of vice versa, the author is effectively creating a lens through which

the reader is to view the picture and thereby inscribing it with a meaning it may or may

not have originally contained.

The content of the Sketch Book equally

reflects the contentious relationship between

text and image, particularly evident in the

stark contrast between Gardner’s descriptions

of the sanctified dead and the photographic

renderings of bloated bodies on the field. For

instance, although the photograph of Culpeper, Va., [Plate 7] portrays little more than the

white tents of an army encampment on the outskirts of a small southern town, Gardner

uses the image as platform to promote the sacred martyr motif: “The altars of its churches

are stained with heroic blood; all along its highways slumber those whose names can

never pass away, and in the vacant camp-grounds cluster recollections fast blending into

traditions that shall grow dearer as they grow old” (Gardner 48). Likewise, in his

description of corpse-strewn fields of Gettysburg, a three-day battle which resulted in

between forty-six and fifty-one thousands casualties, Gardner paints a sanitized and

purposefully romanticized portrait of the fallen Union soldiers. Though he opens his

elegy by acknowledging the anguished appearance of the bodies, he quickly abandons

this candid approach and adopts another more in keeping with the times. He writes,

Plate 7

Some of the dead presented an aspect which showed that they had suffered severely just pervious to dissolution, but these were few in number

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compared with those who wore a calm and resigned expression, as though they had passed away in the act of prayer. Others had smiles on their faces, and looked as if they were in the act of speaking. Some lay stretched on their backs, as if friendly hands had prepared them for burial. (Gardner 37)

8 While this vignette does present a comforting image

of the dead resting peacefully in nature’s cathedral,

it is a far cry from the brutally realistic and painful

scene depicted in the accompanying photograph

titled “Field Where General Reynolds Fell,

Gettysburg, July, 1863” [Plate 8]. Here the viewer

will not see soldiers lying serenely with peaceful expressions, akin to those observed in

moments of deep religious fervor, but rather swollen bodies, stiffened with rigor mortis.

In the place of order and tranquility, the onlooker will witness disheveled clothing, torn

by the wounded soldiers themselves who sought to discover the severity of their wounds

and by scavengers who rifled the dead men’s uniforms and pilfered anything of value.

Neither are their positions restful, but rather twisted and contorted. Though Gardner is

correct in claiming that “the picture

conveys…the blank horror and reality

of war,” he fails to notice that his text

tells a different story.

Plate 8

Plate 9

To be fair, one should note that

Gardner does retain a higher degree of

accuracy in other places in the Sketch Book, particularly in his renderings of the

Confederate dead whose sacrifice need not be vindicated for the photographer’s northern

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audience. For example, in his description of “A Harvest of Death,” [Plate 9] he provides

a much more realistic if somewhat troubling description of the Southern dead, which

bears striking resemblance to the realistic attention to detail visible in Crane’s prose:

And the distorted dead recall the ancient legends of men torn in pieces by the savage wantonness of fiends. Swept down without preparation, the shattered bodies fall in all conceivable positions. The rebels represented in the photograph are without shoes…Around is scattered the litter of the battle-field, accoutrements, ammunition, rags, cup and canteens, crackers, haversacks, &c., and letters. (Gardner 36)

Had Gardner stopped here, one might conclude that he was indeed remaining faithful to

the bare facts of the photograph; however, following these forthright observations, he

quickly shifts from role of reporter to that of moralist and attempts to impose a narrative

on the scene: “Killed in the frantic efforts to break the steady lines of any army of patriots,

whose heroism only excelled theirs in motive, they paid with life the price of their

treason” (Gardner 36). Thus, by acknowledging the grotesque forms to be a penalty for

the South’s disloyalty, Gardner attempts to justify the horror of the scene before him.

In addition to participating in the nationalistic mythos of the sacred martyr,

Gardner also incorporates the pastoral narrative, compiling an archive of landscape

scenes and often making nature itself the subject of the photograph (Sweet 122). For

instance, in the vignette which accompanies his picture “Fortifications on Heights of

Centreville, Va., [Plate 10] Gardner states that

“The view from the crest of the works was very

fine. To the east was a wide area of undulating

country covered with dense woods, and with

grassy hill-sides here and there smiling to each

Plate 10

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other over the forests. Looking west the eyes

rested on a fertile valley, watered by countless

streams, dotted with farm-houses and herds” (5).

Likewise, in the description which precedes his

bucolic depiction of Burnside Bridge, Antietam,

[Plate 11] the photographer focuses on the “bold

bluffs, crowned with oaks and fringed with tangled bushes, [which] form a most

delightful valley” and the “miniature river, broken here and there by tiny cascades,

[which] hurries down to the Potomac” (Gardner 20). At first glance, these pastoral

sketches and their correlating pictures seem out of place in a book dedicated to war. One

would think that the soldier/corpse would be in the foreground and the land in the

background, but this is clearly not the case. Of the five images in the Sketch Book

dedicated to the battle of Antietam, three are of tranquil, rural scenes, one is of a signal

tower, and one of Lincoln’s visit; ironically, none of Gardner’s famous images of the

Antietam dead appear in this collection despite the fact that they were clearly at the

photographer’s disposal. Though the reason for this conspicuous absence is unknown,

one can speculate that Gardner, fearing that too many images of mangled corpses—both

those at Antietam and those at Gettysburg—would overwhelm the reader, removed the

offending photographs and replaced them with scenes of rural harmony.

Plate 11

While on one hand, these pastoral scenes function as buffers, absorbing the shock

engendered by their more violent counterparts, they also allay the viewers’ anxiety by

offering a means of renewal and restoration. Though Gardner frequently refers to the

devastation wrought by war, he always appends such statements with reassuring claims

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confirming nature’s regenerative power. For instance, in his description of Culpepper,

Virginia, the photographer writes, “Another year, and peace will have hidden the scars

that now so sadly mar its beauty. Nature cannot be wholly defrauded of her blossoms, or

prevented from drawing her mantle over the deserts that mankind may make” (Gardner

48). Though war might bring death and desolation, the tragedy will usher in “a future

prosperity that shall prove more than compensation for troubles past” (Gardner 48).

In this pivotal period in America’s visual culture, when the camera or, as Holmes

would call it, the “truthful sunbeam” revealed horrors heretofore unimagined by the

unsuspecting civilian populace, and publishers and photographers alike hastened to

construct a narrative to rationalize the travesty, a young writer earnestly attempted to

perceive and comprehend war (Holmes, “Doings” 11). While the numerous similarities

between Crane’s imagery and Gardner’s photographs have led several critics to surmise

that the writer was, at some point, exposed to the Sketch Book, this hypothesis, though

probable, cannot be absolutely confirmed. If not to the Sketch Book itself, one can

nonetheless presume that Crane would have come into contact with the archive of Civil

War photographs and their accompanying ideology in one form or another. Indeed, the

sheer number of images circulating in the 1880s and 90s—not to mention the author’s

meticulous research in the area—strongly supports the conclusion that these images, and

the narrative which surrounded them, significantly influenced The Red Badge of Courage.

Prior to examining the correspondence between Crane’s imagery and the

photographic representations of the dead, however, the reader should note the manner in

which the author invokes and inverts the pastoral/sacred martyr mythos. The pastoral

mode, which first evidences itself in the colorful landscapes depicted in the opening

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pages of the novel, rises to the forefront of the drama when Henry flees into the forest

following his desertion. As the exhausted youth stumbles through the dense foliage,

Nature, though at first averse to the unanticipated incursion, appears to offer succor.

Crane writes, “This landscape gave him assurance. A fair field holding life. It was the

religion of peace. It would die if its timid eyes were compelled to see blood. He

conceived Nature to be a woman with a deep aversion to tragedy” (37) [emphasis mine

here and in all subsequent quotations]. Exhibiting marked similarity to the treatment it

receives in Gardner’s Sketch Book, Nature is portrayed here as a benign force, which

empathizes with the human condition and seeks to comfort the youth. Furthermore, by

declaring that Nature had “no ears” for the “rumble of death,” Crane seems to be

implying that Nature is capable of overcoming war and providing a safe haven from the

chaos and destruction of the battlefield (Crane 37).

The sacred martyr motif also makes an appearance in this sylvan scene. Though

Crane employed a religious rhetoric earlier in the novel—in chapter three he refers to the

“cathedral light of the forest” and the “aisles of the wood”—this trope becomes the

primary means of description in chapter seven. In this passage, the author transforms the

copse into a chapel bathed in a holy glow: “At length he reached a place where the high,

arching boughs made a chapel. He softly pushed the green doors aside and entered. Pine

needles were a gentle brown carpet. There was a religious half light” (Crane 38).

Clearly, this tranquil grove is sacred ground; a fitting resting place for the glorious and

heroic martyrs described so poignantly by Gardner, Holmes and the editors of the New

York Times.

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But instead of a smiling soldier resting peacefully in his final sleep, Henry is

confronted with a horrible “thing”—a moldering, partially decomposed corpse. In this

encounter with gross reality, the youth and, consequentially, the reader are stripped of all

illusions regarding the sacred dead:

Near the threshold he stopped, horror-stricken at the sight of a thing. He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip. The youth gave a shriek as he confronted the thing. He was for moments turned to stone before it. He remained staring into the liquid looking eyes. The dead man and the living man exchanged a long look. (Crane 38)

In this startling moment of awakening, Crane reveals the truth about death in war—

rendering it as neither glorious nor beautiful, but obscene and horrible. The corpse is not

elevated to the position of saintly martyr but rather dehumanized and diminished to the

status of “thing.”

The terror inspired by this image is exacerbated by Nature’s incipient hostility. As

Henry, reeling from a sight too terrible to comprehend, stumbles backwards, Nature

attempts to inhibit his flight—entangling him in its thick undergrowth and threatening to

thrust him upon the corpse itself. Crane writes, “The branches pushing against him,

threatened to throw him over upon it. His unguided feet, too, caught aggravatingly in

brambles; and with it all he received a subtle suggestion to touch the corpse” (38). In

opposition to its traditional function as an artifice to enclose, mute and mitigate images of

death, Nature, in this scene, functions to intensify the confrontation, forcing the

individual to face this intractable portrait of human mortality. Likewise, though the decay

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of the corpse speaks to the regenerative power of nature, the rotting body is the antithesis

of the uplifting depictions of natural renewal conveyed by Gardner and his

contemporaries.

In this appalling scene, Crane succeeds in summoning and inverting the

pastoral/sacred martyr narrative and thereby revealing its inadequacy to account for war’s

savage reality. Having powerfully presented his argument, the author closes the scene

with two final references to the cultural mythos which further demonstrate its

insufficiency. When the youth finally breaks free from the loathsome chapel, his

perspective of the natural world is radically different from that of the young man who

entered the grove a few moments before. Though Nature holds out conciliating arms

which attempt to prevent the youth from returning to the battleground, Henry, unable to

forgive the recent treachery, rejects these gestures of accord: “After its previous hostility

this new resistance of the forest filled him with fine bitterness. It seemed Nature could

not be quite ready to kill him” (Crane 40). Clearly, Nature is no longer a benevolent

being but a sinister force, a reminder of man’s corporeality and an agent of mortality.

Though it may not choose to kill Henry at the present moment, the text implies that

Nature will eventually—it is only a matter of time.

The youth’s escape is equally ensconced in the rhetoric of the sacred, though the

tone it adopts is decidedly different from that which marked his entrance:

The trees began softly to sing a hymn of twilight. The sun sank until slanted bronze rays struck the forest. There was a lull in the noises of insects as if they had bowed their beaks and were making a devotional pause. There was silence save for the chanted chorus of the trees. Then, upon the stillness, there suddenly broke a tremendous clangor of sounds. A crimson roar came from the distance. (Crane 39)

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In the same way that the corpse disrupted the semiotics of the hallowed copse, so the

sounds of war intrude upon the reverent quiet of the forest, revealing Nature’s inability to

prevent war’s incursion on her peaceful domain. Thus, by juxtaposing sacred and

profane and portraying Nature as an inimical entity, the author successfully invalidates

the telos and calls for an authentic depiction of war based not on the aestheticizing texts

of the culture but on the brutal realities of the photographic record.

Faithful to his own injunction, Crane purposefully creates a counter-narrative,

which, sundering itself from the conventions of the pastoral/sacred martyr mode, seeks to

fashion an accurate rendering of war by directly translating the photographic into the

textual. Appearing in relative isolation, the images are allowed to speak for themselves.

No attempt is made to rationalize or justify the travesties which confront the reader. The

caption and interpretative frame have been stripped away—only the corpse remains to

exchange a “long look” with the inquisitive eye.

This endeavor to excise the corpse from the mythology surrounding it is

particularly evident in Henry’s first encounter with death. Occurring relatively early in

the novel, this scene is rendered with scrupulous, even photographic, detail:

Once the line encountered the body of a dead soldier. He lay upon his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward suit of yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his shoes had been worn to the thinness of writing paper, and from a great rent in one the dead foot projected piteously…The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in the dead eyes the answer to the Question. (Crane 19)

Readers familiar with the archive of Civil War images would have quickly recognized the

similarity this description holds to Gardner’s and Brady’s photographs of individual

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corpses. Due to the lack of restriction on the

photographic arts during this time, photographers had

complete creative license and often chose to depict

bodies with upturned faces in order to maximize

dramatic effect (many scenes were so arranged).

Images of dead confederates at Spotsylvania [Plate

12] and Petersburg [Plate 13] provide two

examples of these individualized death studies,

which share several notable commonalities with

Crane’s vignette. Both soldiers lie on their backs

facing the blue firmament. The uniform and

shoes of the Confederate in the Petersburg study show signs of wear and exposure to the

elements, while the “tawny” beard and disconcerting stare of the corpse at Spotsylvania

fill the viewer with dismay. The anxiety evoked by this passage is compounded by the

narrator’s silence regarding the circumstances of the men’s death. Who were these

soldiers? Did they die heroically? Was their sacrifice of value or in vain? These queries,

which can be subsumed under “the Question” acknowledged by Crane, are all left

unanswered. After rendering this evocative scene, the narrative quickly moves on,

refusing to satisfy the reader’s curiosity.

Plate 12

Plate 13

In addition to the individual death study, Crane mimics the photographic record in

his construction of landscapes of death, a further inversion of the pastoral mode. One of

the first times this descriptive pattern is employed is directly following the Rebel charge

on the Union line in the fifth chapter of the novel: “As the smoke slowly eddied away, the

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youth saw that the charge had been repulsed…The waves had receded, leaving bits of

dark debris upon the ground” (Crane 30). Though in this quotation Crane uses the broad

term “debris” to convey the ruins of war, he is much more specific in other passages:

“The little narrow roadway now lay lifeless. There were overturned wagons like sun-

dried bowlders. The bed of the former torrent was

choked with the bodies of horses and splintered parts

of war machines” (Crane 57). The attention to detail

in this description clearly recalls photographs such as

Gardner’s “Artillery Caisson” [Plate 14]. While the

wreckage of war in the form of dead horses, corpses

and shattered war machines comprises the

foreground of several of Crane’s battle vistas,

farmhouses and barns often compose the

background such as in chapter twenty-two when the

author describes “a house, calm and white” which

stands composedly “amid bursting shells” (Crane

57). This type of landscape, which contrasts the

debris of battle with images of rustic life, can be

observed in several Civil War pictures including

“View at Trostle’s Barn” [Plate 15] and “Trostle’s

House” [Plate 16], two images from the battlefield

of Gettysburg. The white house in the backdrop of

the latter picture is of particular interest because of its correspondence to the white

Plate 14

Plate 15

Plate 16

56

farmhouse mentioned in Crane novel. Though this parallel might be mere coincidence,

the number of white houses which appear throughout the various war albums—this color

provided an excellent contrast to the gray tones of black and white photography—would

seem to support the conclusion that this house is but another image borrowed from the

archive of Civil War photographs. In examining these landscapes of death, however, the

reader should note that Crane never identifies the battlefields he describes. This

anonymity prevents the vicarious observer from connecting the devastating scenes with a

mythologizing narrative, and in depriving the onlooker of this knowledge, imbues the

landscape with a sense of futility.

Finally, Crane’s emphasis on position and posture recalls the repository of Civil

War images, specifically Gardner’s death studies of Antietam. In the brief hiatus

following the first attack, Henry notes, “Under foot there were a few ghastly forms

motionless. They lay twisted in fantastic contortions. Arms were bent and heads were

turned in incredible ways. It seemed

that the dead men must have fallen

from some great height to get into

such positions. They looked to be

dumped out upon the ground from

the sky” (Crane 30). Similarly, in

the midst of the second engagement the narrator describes the “bodies twisted in

impossible shapes” (Crane 97). This disturbing imagery decidedly evokes the distorted

forms apparent in “The Dead at Antietam” [Plate 17]. This attention to arrangement

Plate 17

57

again surfaces when Henry, having only recently escaped from the horrors of Nature’s

chapel, stumbles upon a quiet assembly of the dead:

He came to a fence and clambered over it. On the far side, the ground was littered with clothes and guns. A newspaper, folded up, lay in the dirt. A dead soldier was stretched with his face hidden in his arm. Farther off there was a group of four or five corpses keeping mournful company. A hot sun had blazed upon the post. In this place the youth felt that he was an invader. This forgotten part of the battle ground was owned by the dead men, and he hurried, in the vague apprehension that one of the swollen forms would rise and tell him to begone. (Crane 40)

From the wooden fence, the clothes and guns strewing the ground, and the folded

newspaper to the corpse whose face lies

hidden from sight, this vignette exhibits a

striking parallelism to Gardner’s photograph,

“Confederate Soldiers by Fence on Hagerston

Pike [Plate 18]. Yet physical detail is not the

only element shared by these images; they are

also alike in their presentational modes, for both are fractured portraits of reality. Abrupt

and disjointed, they equally lack a totalizing, mythologizing narrative.

Plate 18

In each of the abovementioned instances, Crane seeks to confront the reader with

graphic images of war completely bereft of a legitimizing or conciliating explanation.

Having discovered the cultural mythos’ gross misappropriation, the author proceeds to

ridicule, manipulate and eventually discard the ideological construct, choosing instead to

furnish the unadulterated, unmoderated, photographic truth. Though, at first glance, the

novel’s conclusion might appear to signal a return to the pastoral mode, the astute reader

will observe a distinct sense of irony in the following passage: “So it came to pass that as

he trudged from the place of blood and wrath his soul changed. He came from hot

58

plowshares to prospects of clover tranquility…Scars faded as flowers…He turned now

with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks—an

existence of soft and eternal peace” (Crane 104). While nature may indeed renew itself

and erase the scars of war, the American people will never be able to completely forget

the atrocities which have occurred on their soil. Though they might attempt to expunge

or assuage the memory, the photographic record and subsequently Crane’ novel will, like

a specter, continually return to haunt the survivors. Thus, by providing stark,

photographic-like depictions of corpses rendered without caption or commentary in the

form of an overarching, mythologizing narrative, The Red Badge of Courage highlights

the inadequacy of the pastoral/sacred martyr ideology and portrays war as a completely

incongruous, irrational struggle. Just as the Crane mockingly refers to the “coherent trail

of bodies” left by the charging regiment, so he, throughout the pages of the novel, strives

to demonstrate war’s total incomprehensibility (82).

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CHAPTER 3

WAR IN THE CITY

In “Mr. Bink’s Day Off” (1894), a brief story from Crane’s New York City

Sketches, the author represents urban dwellers as “warriors from the metropolis” and

stalwartly declares that “the sense of city is battle” (66). Likewise, in his vignette entitled

“When Everyone is Panic Stricken” (1884), Crane aligns a Bowery fire with a Civil War

battlefield, comparing the approach of the fire engine to “the headlong sweep of a battery

of artillery,” the reverberations of horses hooves to “the rush of infantry volleys” and the

machine’s raucous ringing both to the “clangorous noise of war” and to “the sound of an

army charging” (NYCS 100-1). Thus, the young author implies that war is not confined

to the locus of the battlefield but is equally manifest in the urban milieu. Though the

“enemy” may assume an array of different forms ranging from flaming infernos, criminal

cohorts, debilitating poverty, disorderly mobs, or incendiary strikers, the sense of strife

and conflict is the same. This conviction, in conjunction with Crane’s two year interim in

New York City, a period lasting from October 1892 to December 1894 during which The

Red Badge of Courage was composed, caused the author to turn to the city itself, a

nucleus of turmoil, strife and social upheaval, as the inspiration for his war vision. While

the novel is replete with urban metaphors, an exemplar being the author’s alignment of a

sweating, exhausted soldier with a laborer at the foundry, this chapter will focus

specifically on four particularly threatening images of metropolitan life: the machine and

the mechanization it engendered, the savage underworld, the chaotic and volatile mob,

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and the ever present reality of class conflict, particularly violent melees between strikers

and state militias/national guard (Crane 30).

While several scholars have acknowledged the influence of the city on Crane’s novel,

none have sought to trace his metaphors to their source in the pictorial press of New York

City and the evocative images it disseminated. Two critics which have treated the topic

with some depth are Amy Kaplan in her essay “The Spectacle of War in Crane’s

Revision of History” and Robert Shulman in his article “The Red Badge of Courage and

Social Violence: Crane’s Myth of America.” Drawing attention to Crane’s tendency to

superimpose an urban rhetoric on the battlefield in which the army is compared to a train,

regiments are transformed into mobs, and officers are reinvented as savvy politicians,

Kaplan draws attention to Crane’s employment of “urban metaphors which overlay the

countryside and leave only traces of the rural landscape” (89). Similarly, Shulman

reflects that “the pervasive smoke, chaos, killing, irrationality and fear are appropriate

metaphors for the burning, terror and killing, its undercurrents of anxiety and deep-rooted

animosities, its widespread image of war and battle, and its intensifying sense of anarchy

and breakdown” (12). While both scholars broadly attribute Crane’s pictorial imagination

to the turbulent social milieu of New York City in the 1890s, neither seeks to pursue the

specific origins of his imagery which appear to stem largely from the domain of the

illustrated press, specifically weekly/monthly publications such as Harper’s and Frank

Leslie’s Magazine which functioned as a supplement to author’s daily experiences.

This failure to provide attribution gives rise to the impression that these metaphors

resulted primarily from Crane’s firsthand observations of city life. Though this

conclusion holds some merit, it clearly falls short of the whole truth. While some of

61

Crane’s imagery can be traced to his personal experiences—one of which being his

account of the flop house in “An Experiment in Misery,” an episode which bears a

striking resemblance to his description of the sleeping soldiers in the fourteenth chapter

of The Red Badge—many of his metaphors and descriptions appear to have been drawn

directly from the pages of the pictorial press. Littered with portraits of violence, both

mechanized and human, these magazines would have provided the inquisitive young

novelist access to a different kind of war in which machines were preeminent, the lower

classes were debased and dehumanized, and savage mobs were pitted against armed

detachments of troops. Crane’s involvement with various printers and publishing houses

and New York City’s status as “the home of the weekly pictorial press” lend further

credence to this theory (Brown, Beyond 188). Therefore, this third chapter will examine

the correspondence between images rendered by the pictorial press, specifically those

depicting occurrences of mechanized or social violence, and correlating descriptions of

hostility in The Red Badge of Courage, thus revealing that even Crane’s perceptions of

his own social moment were highly mediated, and consequently, the “war” which he

superimposes onto the tableau of the Civil War battlefield was not the reality of the

Gilded Age per se but rather the sensationalized and prejudiced projections of the

pictorial press.

While the advent of the machine age and the technological advances which

accompanied it ushered in numerous improvements including exponential increases in

productivity—between 1860 and 1900, steel production increased from thirteen to

approximately five thousand tons and the gross domestic agricultural yield tripled—

standardization of time and mechanical parts, and developments in transportation and

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communication, these inventions and the societal transformations which they engendered

were often met with fear and apprehension on the part of the populace (Trachtenburg 53,

56). Four charges repeatedly brought against the industrial revolution included the

rampant growth of urban poverty which had accompanied the introduction of the factory

system, the continuously mounting tension between capital and labor, the degradation

and automation of human beings, and the numerous cases of mechanized violence.

While poverty levels in large cities had been an issue prior to this period, the

massive migrations from rural areas to urban centers which occurred during these years

in conjunction with the influx of immigrants from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe

quickly exacerbated the problem. Likewise, the Machine Age, which Alan Trachtenburg

has characterized as “the transference of technical knowledge from workers to machines,

a process mediated by a new corps of trained engineers,” effectively eradicated the need

for skilled labor (Trachtenburg 69). Due to these changes, the knowledge and skills that

had granted manual laborers a degree of power in the past and allowed them to have a

voice in the production process in the form of craft unions and workers’ guilds were

rendered obsolete (Dubofsky 35). Suddenly vulnerable, the laboring classes found

themselves completely at the mercy of powerful industrial magnates. Thus, workers were

stripped of agency and transformed into little more than voiceless automatons,

interchangeable parts that were easily replaceable. In response to this disenfranchisement,

manual laborers were forced to employ the only means of defense left them, the strike.

Consequently, the machine became intrinsically tied to instances of violent social

upheaval. In regard to this association, Alan Trachtenburg writes, “Each act of national

celebration seemed to evoke its opposite. The 1877 railroad strike, the first instance of

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machine smashing and class violence on a national scale, followed the 1876 Centennial

Exposition, and the even fiercer Pullman strike of 1894 came fast on the heels of the

World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893” (39). In addition to strikes and lockouts, the

redefinition of labor soon gave rise to other concerns regarding the increased power

machines were obtaining and the blurring of the boundaries between man and machine.

Finally, the numerous cases of “mechanized violence,” especially evident in the

production of heavy-metals, textiles and chemicals, not to mention railroads which alone

claimed the lives of 230 thousand workers between the years of 1890 and 1917, caused

the image of the machine to be associated with death and mutilation (Trachtenburg 91).

While images of machinery in the Gilded Age abound, three drawings in

particular reflect the anxieties of this turbulent period in history—fears which are equally

evident in Crane’s novel. The first image, published in Frank Leslie’s Monthly Magazine

in July 1883, exhibits the diminutive figure of a

man surrounded by the machinery of a giant

engine [Plate 19]. Though the article praises the

wonders of technology which could enable such

a colossal structure as the Brooklyn Bridge and

the passenger cars which shuttle across it, the

picture, while equally celebratory, also

conveys a sense of apprehension. Dwarfed by

his creation, the man appears to be completely

subject to it. Similarly, the high degree of

detail with which the engine room is rendered

Plate 19

Plate 20

64

compared to that devoted to the man implies that the machine is paramount, the human

superfluous. The second image, which appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in

July 1871, depicts the Sommeiller Boring Machine [Plate 20], a European invention used

to tunnel through mountains. This illustration is of particular interest for its conflation of

man and machine. Though the miners in the foreground are clearly depicted as

autonomous units, the men in the background, specifically those around the borders and

at the top of the sketch, appear to be merging with the machine. This assimilation, when

viewed in conjunction with the machine’s function—to drill and pound its way through

layers of solid rock—creates an unsettling image of invasive violence. Finally, the lack

of facial definition, especially when contrasted with fastidious detail with which the

Sommeiller machine is rendered, produces an impression of uniformity,

interchangeability and standardization. Further illustrating the theme of mechanized

violence, Frank Leslie’s 1868 portrayal of a fire engine explosion depicts the catastrophic

consequences of machinery gone awry [Plate 21]. Though this picture recalls the events

of an accident, it clearly speaks to

machinery’s hazardous potential, particularly

emphasizing the devastation it can wreak on

the human body, a recurring theme throughout

Crane’s fiction.

Though the machine makes an early

appearance in Crane’s urban novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, it does not assume full

symbolic value until The Red Badge of Courage at which point it resurfaces as a violent,

pervasive force which entraps, transforms and ultimately slaughters the men of the

Plate 21

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regiment. As the narrative progresses, Henry associates war more and more with

machinery and mechanization. While the naive youth of the first chapter longs to witness

“a Greeklike struggle,” in which heroic warriors overcome insurmountable odds and

attain the victory through nothing other than their own personal charisma and valor, the

experienced boy of the eighth chapter realizes that the “great man” has been replaced by

the all-powerful machine: “The battle was like the grinding of an immense and terrible

machine to him. Its complexities and powers, its grim processes, fascinated him. He

must go and see it produce corpses” (Crane, RBC 40). According to this new paradigm,

the soldier is no longer an independent individual capable of great deeds but an

indistinguishable automaton, who must fulfill his function, insignificant as it may be.

Having sacrificed his autonomy, the soldier becomes little more than an interchangeable

part, a fragment of a larger whole. This transformation is powerfully manifest in the

narrator’s account of Henry’s first engagement which occurs in the fifth chapter of the

novel:

Before he was ready to begin—before he had announced to himself that he was about to fight—he threw the obedient, well-balanced rifle into position and fired a first wild shot. Directly he was working at his weapon like an automatic affair…He became not a man but a member. He felt that something of which he was a part—a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country—was in crisis. He was welded into a common personality which was dominated by a single desire. For some moments he could not flee no more than a little finger can commit a revolution from the hand. (Crane, RBC 27) [Emphasis mine here and in all subsequent quotations]

In these lines, Henry’s humanity is stripped away and his individuality eclipsed by the

collective good. Likewise, his actions are revealed to be not the outgrowths of heroic

devotion but merely the products of instinctual, reflex. The sentiments expressed in this

passage are reiterated a few pages later when the youth, following his desertion, reflects,

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“He had fled, he told himself, because annihilation approached. He had done a good part

in saving himself, who was a little piece of the army. He had considered the time…to be

one in which it was the duty of every little piece to rescue itself if possible. Later the

officers could fit the little pieces together again, and make a battle front” (Crane, RBC

36). By identifying Henry as a “little piece of the army,” the narrator is emphasizing the

youth’s immateriality and powerlessness, an inconsequentiality which is particularly

salient when juxtaposed against the Homeric heroes Henry evoked earlier.

Having drawn the analogy between war and mechanization, Crane continues to

expand it by invoking a vocabulary of automation, a stylistic choice particularly evident

in his descriptions of Henry’s regiment specifically and the Union Army in general. For

example, in chapter eleven, the narrator states that “His [Henry’s] education had been

that success for that mighty blue machine was certain; that it would make victories as a

contrivance turns out buttons” (Crane, RBC 54). This quote recalls the dehumanizing

world of the 19th century factory, in which workers performed the same menial task for

hours on end, and by comparing costly victories to insignificant objects such as buttons,

effectively diminishes the soldiers’ sacrifice. Furthermore, this passage reveals a new

hierarchy of values in which the perpetuation of the machine is placed above the survival

of the individual. Regardless of how many lives it requires, the machine must be

preserved and, consequently, victories must be attained. Later in the novel, Crane again

employs this mechanistic rhetoric, when he describes the youth’s confusion over the

“machinery of orders that started the charge” (Crane, RBC 81). This bewilderment

juxtaposed with the young man’s subsequent obedience symbolizes a loss of personal

volition. Though the thought of leaving the safety of the forest to charge across an open

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field under heavy enemy fire is incomprehensible to the youth, he nonetheless

participates in the assault. Having once submitted his will to the caprices of the war

machine, he has no choice but to obey its every whim. Crane utilizes this trope a third

time when the regiment, unable to withstand the barrage of enemy fire, slowly begins to

melt away. In the face of the men’s impotency, the narrator declares, “the regiment was a

machine run down” (Crane, RBC 86). A strange response to the carnage and death which

pervade the scene, this statement reveals just how far removed the men are from their

own humanity.

In addition to portraying war as a mechanism that undermines personal autonomy

and divests soldiers of their individuality, Crane repeatedly emphasizes the shifting

demarcations between man and machine and the latter’s potential for violence. While the

men in the novel are continuously dehumanized, the machines are imbued with human

attributes. This personification is especially palpable in the fourth chapter when Henry

flees from the lines in terror. Maintaining that the Confederate soldiers are “machines of

steel” which have been “wound up perhaps to fight until sundown,” he sympathizes with

the feebleminded men who have remained behind: “The youth pitied them as he ran.

Methodical idiots! Machine-like fools! ... Too, he felt pity for the guns, standing, six good

comrades, in a bold row” (Crane, RBC 33, 34). In this indictment, the distance between

soldier and machine is bridged. Both entities are treated as “comrades” and the plight of

both is a cause for compassion, notwithstanding the fact that the latter is an inanimate

object. A similar employment of personification can be observed a few paragraphs later

when Crane again attempts to humanize the artillery stating, “The cannon with their

noses poked slantingly at the ground grunted and grumbled like stout men, brave but with

68

objections to the hurry” (RBC 35). While the machine’s appropriation of the soldiers’

humanity is a subtle undercurrent, other forms of mechanical violence directed against

mankind are far more overt. Having already acknowledged that the war machine’s

primary function is to “produce corpses,” Henry, surveying the stream of wounded

soldiers, contends that “the torn bodies expressed the awful machinery in which the men

had been entangled” (Crane, RBC 41). For the Gilded Age audience, this description

would doubtlessly have evoked images of industrial violence. Living in a cultural

moment in which such “accidents”—disastrous occurrences often resulting from

inadequate or negligible safety standards—were commonplace, these individuals could

easily have envisioned the terrible consequences which would result if machines were

ever purposefully directed against humanity. A final image of “mechanized violence” can

be seen in chapter seventeen when Henry, waiting for the onslaught of Confederate

soldiers, clutches his rifle nervously and wishes that “it was an engine of annihilating

power” (Crane, RBC 75). This quotation aligns the steam engine, the symbol of the

Machine Age, with the image of mass destruction, a conflation which seems to contain a

subtle allusion to Sir Hiram Maxim’s 1884 infamous invention—the machine gun, an

automation frequently featured in the New York Times and other daily periodicals.

Paralleling the growth of these concerns, the rise of urban poverty, which

corresponded with the advent of Machine Age and the ensuing industrialization,

produced a distinct sense of unease among middle and upper class Americans. As the rift

between have’s and have not’s continued to widen, the bourgeois, who composed the

primary readership of Harper’s and Frank Leslie’s, sought to differentiate themselves

from the slum dwellers, many of whom were impoverished immigrants and refugees. In

69

order to achieve this end, a series of contrasts was developed in which middle class

Americans were portrayed as upright, moral vanguards of culture whereas the poor,

unfortunates who inhabited the city’s dilapidated tenements were depicted as ignorant,

slovenly, and immoral individuals who had little respect for law, order or virtue (Brown,

Beyond 80, Mariani 38). This tendency to demonize the other was fueled by the

animosity felt by many members of the working classes who believed that immigrants, a

work force often employed as strikebreakers, were stealing their jobs. Though unfair,

this charge was supported by fact for, as Trachtenburg reveals, “by 1870 one out of every

three industrial workers was an immigrant” (88).

To highlight this divide, publishers frequently portrayed slum dwellers as

degenerate forms, uncivilized masses who had regressed into brute savagery. Giorgio

Mariani addresses these representational strategies in his chapter “Peeping at the Other

Half: The Ideological Structures of Slum Literature,” wherein he affirms that between

1870 and 1900 the popular press often delineated the urban poor as “dangerous classes

[which were]… separated from the respectable ones not only by the lack of wealth and

morality, but by virtue of their bestial looks…In short, very much like savages, slum

dwellers were described as people with no culture of their own, but rather as

uncivilized—which generally meant bestial—people” (47). Clearly reflecting the

influence of Darwin’s seminal book Origin of Species (1859), illustrated magazines

began propagating texts and engravings which depicted the inhabitants of the urban

underworld as animalistic entities, who had not yet attained the level of evolutionary

development attained by their more sophisticated and virtuous neighbors. Regarding this

proclivity, Mariani writes, “animal imagery is often deployed…when describing slum

70

dwellers. Street urchins are referred to as ‘street’ or ‘dock rats,’ ‘dogs,’ or ‘cockroaches.’

The tenements are ‘unfit to be the kennels of dogs,’ and yet the poor are so accustomed to

the filth and vermin that the reformers find them ‘reluctant’ to leave their dirty

surroundings” (47). This inflammatory rhetoric was likewise employed to explain the

savagery and bloodshed which characterized the slums, and in accordance with this

paradigm, signified a further retrogression into barbarism and animalistic violence.

Three images published in Frank Leslie’s Magazine which illustrate the

bestiality and degeneracy among the urban crowds are “The Dog pit at Kit Burns’ during

a fight” (1866), ““New York City.—Among the Poor—A summer evening scene at the

Five Points” (1873), and “New York City.—Russian Jews at Castle Garden—A Scene in

the early morning” (1882). The first engraving [Plate 22] portrays the lurid spectacle of a

dog fight. Of particular interest,

however, are not the dogs, which are

spotlighted in the center of the sketch,

but rather the men who compose the

peripheries. An uncouth, riotous horde,

these reprobates epitomize the depravity and

animalism most feared by the bourgeoisie. Similarly,

the stooped posture, claw-like hands and contorted

features of the dog trainers more closely resemble the

beasts they are watching than their human

counterparts. While the second picture [Plate 23],

which details a summer evening in the slums,

Plate 22

Plate 23

71

initially appears to be a more positive portrayal of the poor, especially in the depiction of

the matronly figure at the left, the attitude and carriage of the men in the drawing quickly

qualify and undermine this optimism. While the first sits slumped against the wall in an

alcohol induced stupor, the second stares defiantly out at the viewers daring them to

challenge his authority. In his commentary on this specific picture, Joshua Brown, author

of Behind the Lines, draws attention to the latter individual’s facial features which,

according to Darwin, recalled his ape-like progenitors:

his heavy brows, small nose, prominent cheekbones, broad upper lip, wide mouth, and jutting jaw defied the physiognomic ideal. The brutish face and posture, not to mention the slovenly dress and clay pipe, were familiar to readers of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper: the subject was a variation of the simianized type of the low Irish immigrant that, ranging between carefree and vicious, had populated urban imagery since the 1840s famine migration. (91)

This illustration is but one of hundreds which attempted to classify the urban poor, and

immigrants in particular, as a class of sub-humans. Two other refugee groups which were

consistently denigrated and dehumanized were the Italians and the Eastern European

Jews (Brown, Beyond 193). While an article published in Frank Leslie’s on August 22,

1885, likens the Italian immigrants to “a herd of human cattle,” a similarly racist piece

printed on August 5, 1882 emphasizes the physical

squalor and moral depravity of the foreign-born

subalterns: “The scenes in the enclosure of which the

refugees had taken possession were often more

offensive, men women, and children being huddled

promiscuously together, many of them disgustingly

filthy and one apparently having much regard for the

Plate 24

72

restraints of morality” (Qtd. in Brown, Beyond 193,195). The image which accompanied

this vignette [Plate 24] equally reflects crowded and filthy conditions in which these

immigrants were forced to abide.

The abundance of animal imagery in both The New York City Sketches and The

Red Badge of Courage seems to support the assumption that Crane had recourse to these

popular modes of representation. In his story “A Christmas Dinner Won in Battle”

(1895), for example, the young author draws attention to the “barbaric hymn” of the

workers, which he likens to “a pagan chant of savage battle and death” (NYCS 122).

Furthermore, in this tale, the author paints a surprisingly harsh, almost sub-human

portrait of the immigrant workers, whom he describes as “floundering in the mud and

raving, bloodthirsty, pitiless and mad as starved wolves” (Crane, NYCS 122). He again

utilizes this animalistic vocabulary in “The Men in the Storm” (1894), a short story

describing a group of destitute men waiting outside a charitable house in a storm hoping

to get beds for five cents a piece. As the snowstorm worsens, the men huddle together

“like sheep”; however, when the door to the lodging house opens, they fight with animal-

like fury to gain entrance, each fearing to be left in the cold.

Before embarking on the a discussion of such imagery in The Red Badge,

however, one must briefly address the question of why Crane would attempt to integrate

the provocative rhetoric of the slums into his fictional account of the Civil War. Perhaps,

the most convincing rationale for this transference can be found in popular notions of

terror and its effect on human behavior. Though the locales of the battlefield and the

slum differ in many ways, they bear one striking similarity—both are governed by fear.

When confronted with their own mortality, whether in the form of enemy fire, starvation,

73

or blank despair, humans, panic-stricken, retreat into utter savagery. Thus, ironically, in

the quest to preserve human life, man is transformed into an animal. This indefinable

terror combined with the feeling of impotence which arises when the soldier/slum dweller

is confronted with a deterministic system is the nexus which unites the Bowery with the

battlefield.

This rhetoric rises to the forefront early in the novel when the regiment engages in

its first skirmish. Choked by smoke and petrified by the fantastical demons which

surround them, the soldiers begin to display strange beast-like behavior: “Many of the

men were making low-toned noises with their mouths, and these subdued cheers, snarls,

imprecations, prayers, made a wild, barbaric song that went as an undercurrent of sound,

strange and chantlike with the resounding chords of a war march” (Crane, RBC 28). This

quotation reveals that the “war atmosphere” takes a toll both physically, in “a blistering

sweat, a sensation that his eyeballs were about to crack like hot stones [and]…a burning

roar [which] filled the ears,” and psychologically, as men, incapable of confronting the

horrors which surround them, regress into a primal, sub-human state (Crane 29).

Likewise, after Henry, half-crazed by battle frenzy, fights wildly and is deemed a “war

god” by his comrades, he is suddenly confronted with the realization that he has been “a

barbarian, a beast” (Crane 76). This degeneracy is the untold story of war. Though

brave and heroic deeds would be recounted for awed listeners, the tale of this savagery

would not grace American parlors until Crane’s radical and, in many ways, controversial

novel shattered the silence.

In addition to utilizing terms such as “barbarian,” “savage,” and “beast,” Crane

appropriates the animal imagery originally applied to slum dwellers. In an array of

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descriptive similes, the author compares the soldiers successively to pigs, terriers, rabbits,

rats, jackasses, dogs, sheep, and panthers (Crane, RBC 20, 21, 33, 73, 73, 76, 80, 99).

Similarly, he likens the fleeing regiment to a herd of “terrified buffalo,” and the charging

youth to “a mad horse” (Crane, RBC 54, 99). Corresponding to these metaphors, Crane

exploits a number of verbs which usually connote animal activities, a few of which

include the words “gallop,” “pounce,” and “howl” (RBC 55/84, 73, 95). The frequency

with which these terms surface in the text—Mordecai and Erin Marcus allege that Crane

used over “eighty figures of speech employing animals or their characteristics” —

supports the conclusion that this device was no mere coincidence, but rather a deliberate

decision (108). Further highlighting the craftsmanship behind this choice, these critics

emphasize the fact that all associations with domestic animals, by far the most frequent

type of metaphor used, are applied to enlisted men; officers are not included in this

grouping. Though unverifiable, this differentiation could speak to the author’s acceptance

of the hierarchical social structure and the stratification and classification it begot. By

portraying enlisted men as dumb, domesticated animals which need to be trained and

guided by a coterie of educated, knowledgeable officers, Crane appears to be supporting

the guardian model of society in which a small group of educated elites makes all judicial

and legislative decisions.

The careful reader will observe that the animal imagery increases as the soldiers

approach the fray. When confronted with danger, these men quickly resort to brutish

violence. In chapter seventeen, for example, the narrator compares the warring soldiers

to “animals tossed for a death struggle into a dark pit” (Crane, RBC 75). A second

occurrence of this regression can be observed in chapter twenty-three when Crane

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describes the charging regiment in terms which more closely resemble the dog-fight

portrayed in Frank Leslie’s illustration than the proceedings of a “civilized” battle: “They

in blue showed their teeth; their eyes shone all white. They launched themselves as at the

throats of those who stood resisting” (Crane, RBC 99). The animalistic hatred exhibited

by the soldiers in this moment is equally visible in an earlier quote in which the author

aligns the protagonist’s frustration at being unable to physically engage his opponent with

that experienced by a domesticated animal harassed by dogs: “He developed the acute

exasperation of a pestered animal, a well-meaning cow worried by dogs…He wished to

rush forward and strangle with his fingers…His impotency appeared to him, and made

his rage into that of a driven beast” (Crane, RBC 29). When viewed jointly, these

descriptors paint a rather unflattering portrait of the soldier, who seems to share more in

common with the horses which pull the artillery carts than the warriors of heroic legend,

and makes the final lines of the novel an apt conclusion to the discourse: “He had been an

animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war” (Crane, RBC 104).

While mechanization and urban poverty were frequent features of the illustrated

news, the topic which elicited by far the most press coverage throughout the Gilded Age

was the vast number of violent confrontations between mobs of angry strikers and armed

detachments of troops. A response to the multitude of transformations precipitated by

America’s rapid industrialization—a few of which included the redefinition of the

fundamental categories of capital and labor—these brutal collisions and their subsequent

representations in the illustrated weeklies appear to have been pivotal factors in the

formation of Crane’s conception of war (Trachtenburg 80). In regard to the social

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upheaval which defined the last three decades of the 19th century, Melvyn Dubofsky

writes,

Students of history must pause and wonder at the roll call of costly late nineteenth-century industrial conflicts: the Molly Maguires of anthracite coal district notoriety; the railroad strikes and riots of 1877; the Haymarket affair of 1886, and its panic-ridden aftermath; the Homestead and Coeur d’Alene conflicts of 1892, in which armed troops ultimately subdued militant strikers and the Pullman railroad boycott of 1894, in which the full weight of the federal government was pitted against striking workers (Dubofsky 39)

These conflicts, which can be differentiated from previous labor disputes both in the

frequency of their occurrence and in the severity their violence, resulted in increased

military intervention in labor issues and harsher governmental policies toward labor

unions and strikes. Based on data acquired from the federal Bureau of Labor statistics,

Dubofsky asserts that “between 1881 and 1890…9,668 strikes and lockouts occurred,

[and] in 1886 alone, 1,432 strikes and 140 lockouts involved some 610, 024 workers”

(38). Similarly, the brutality with which the strikes were suppressed is almost

unfathomable to the modern American. The Great Railroad strike of 1877, for example,

resulted in over a hundred casualties, while the Haymarket affair, a tragic event in which

a bomb was thrown into a group of policeman killing eight, marked one of the many

instances during this period in which an armed detachment of police/militia/infantry

would open fire on a crowd of unarmed citizens.

This pervasive violence gave rise to what Terry Mulcaire calls a “language of

martial industrialism” wherein the mob and the police/state militia/federal troops were

depicted as warring factions (57). This rhetoric was particularly evident in the popular

press which frequently utilized terms such as “war,” “battle,” and “battlefields” to

describe the struggle between labor and capital. Newspaper headlines dated to the period

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clearly display the predominance of this martial vocabulary. One New York Times article,

for example, gives an account of “A Day of Rioting. Bloody Work at Homestead. Twenty

Killed in Battle Between Strikers and Pinkerton Men” (July 7, 1892) while another

reports on “A Battle Between Miners. Men Shot and a Mill Blown up in Coeur D’Alene

Region” (July 12, 1892). Likewise, a column in the Washington Post dated to July 7,

1894 predicts that “war of the bloodiest kind in Chicago is imminent, and before

tomorrow goes by the railroad lines and yards may be turned into battle fields strewn

with hundreds of dead and wounded” (Qtd. in Mariani 100). Once introduced into the

illustrated press, this “martial language” was translated into a series of etchings and

engravings which, despite being somewhat sensationalized, rendered a powerful portrait

of mob warfare. Though Crane may not have personally witnessed labor riots or directly

observed armed encounters between

Pinkertons and strikers, he would undoubtedly

have been exposed to the stirring rhetoric and

the dramatic images it produced.

Plate 25

From this tumultuous milieu, two

types of pictures emerged—those emphasizing

the anarchy of the mob and those displaying cases of

military intervention in the form of armed suppression.

Within the first category can be found images such as

the Harper’s Weekly engraving “Driving the Rioter’s

from Turner Hall,” (August 18, 1877) and the Frank

Leslie sketch “Illinois.—The street-railway troubles in

Plate 26

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Chicago—the police charging a mob of strikers and ‘hoodlums’ on Centre Street, North

Side” (October 20, 1888). Though vastly different in their point of view—the first [Plate

25] offers a panoramic tableau of mass chaos, while the second [Plate 26] renders a

narrowly focused portrait of a small group of rioters—both images convey the same

sense of confusion, violence and anarchy. Within these pictures, lawlessness and

mayhem reign, and fear is rampant. Appearing in direct opposition to the order and

respect for authority espoused by the middle and upper classes, these images were

purposefully designed to manipulate the emotions of their audience. Furthermore, the

severe economic depression of 1893-94 in conjunction with the social upheaval generated

by the Pullman strike would have brought concerns regarding the spread of anarchy and

mob violence to the forefront of the public consciousness at the exact time Crane sat

down to write The Red Badge (Shulman 7). .

Appearing in stark contrast to the pandemonium of the previous two engravings,

the orderly formations of the troops appearing in Frank Leslie’s etching of “The Great

Strike—The Sixth Maryland Regiment Fighting its way through Baltimore” (August 11,

1877) and Harper’s illustration of “National

Guardsman firing into the mob at Loomis and

Forty-ninth streets” (July 21, 1894) signal the return

of law and the banishment of chaos. Though the

modern reader might be horrified at these

unpardonable displays of violence directed against

American citizens, readers of the Gilded Age would

have viewed these demonstrations of martial force

Plate 27

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as imperative steps toward the restoration of order, a necessary albeit costly endeavor.

While the former image [Plate 27] portrays a large detachment of soldiers, organized in

neat rows, firing into a disorderly mass of

rioters, the latter [Plate 28] exhibits a disciplined

group of soldiers engaged in a coordinated

attack upon an unruly mob. In both images,

formation and regimentation, symbols of

systemization and legitimacy, are highlighted. If

total anarchy is to be avoided, disciple must be imposed. The baser instincts of the rabble

must be restrained. Indeed, the sense of martial order and regimentation in these images

is so palpable that, were it not for the urban landscape—composed by telephone wires

and city streets in Leslie’s sketch and by a railroad car and a crane in Harper’s—one

might believe one had been transported to an actual battlef

Plate 28

ield.

The themes conveyed in these images take textual form in the pages of The Red

Badge of Courage, evidenced most clearly in Crane’s portrayal of the tumultuous “mob”

of soldiers and in his depictions of class conflict visible in the strained relations between

officers and enlisted men. The author likens groups of soldiers to “mobs” numerous

times throughout the novel comparing the regiment to “a moblike body of men who

galloped like wild horses,” in one instance, and declaring that “the mob of men was

bleeding” in another (Crane, RBC 25, 43). Likewise, this term is employed in chapter

three to describe the thoughts which pass through Henry’s mind as he is swept along by

the hurried movements of the regiment: “He was bewildered. As he ran with his

comrades he strenuously tried to think, but all he knew was that if he fell down those

80

comrades behind would tread upon him…He felt carried along by a mob” (Crane, RBC

18). Having lost the opportunity for contemplation, the youth stumbles mindlessly

toward the place of death. In the same way that the actions of riotous mobs appeared to

arise from spontaneous impulse rather than premeditated intention, so Henry is forced to

abandon rational thought and act from base instinct. Not only do the soldiers think like a

mob, however, they also sound and act like one. In chapter fourteen, the narrator

declares that “the men, pitching forward insanely, had burst into cheerings, moblike and

barbaric,” and in chapter twenty-three, he states that “the mob of blue men hurled

themselves on the dangerous group of rifles” (Crane, RBC 82, 98). To the outside

observer, the idea of charging into the throes of enemy fire or giving voice to savage

shouts seems completely irrational and absurd. Yet, one must be reminded that these

baffling performances are not the outgrowths of a composed and coherent mind, but the

confused and incoherent products of a war-maddened mob. Henry’s frenetic display of

violence, in which he continues to load and fire long after the enemy has cleared the field,

is one such spectacle of irrationality. In addition to manifesting itself in the inexplicable

behavior of the men, this “anarchic violence” can also be seen in the confusion and chaos

of the battlefield (Shulman 7). Several times throughout the novel the regiment loses

itself in the smoke, and in one instance, the men even believe they are being fired upon

by their own troops. Similarly, the unexpected appearances of the enemy, which seems to

materialize without warning from the grey clouds of rifle smoke, inspire fear and panic.

The hysteria the soldiers’ experience when confronted with this bedlam would have

resonated well with an audience who likewise feared the consequences of a loss of

control and a yielding to anarchy.

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The specter of class warfare so vividly rendered by Harper’s and Frank Leslie’s

magazines is equally apparent in The Red Badge of Courage. Though the social strife

which defined the Gilded Age is typically portrayed as a clash between capital and labor,

it can also be interpreted as a class conflict in which poor, dependent workers were pitted

against wealthy, powerful capitalists. Once translated into the war novel, this strife can

be seen in the fierce antagonism which exists between officers and enlisted men. In

regard to this discord within the ranks of the Union Army, Amy Kaplan writes, “He

[Crane] also finds a social structure that is ridden with class tensions between officers and

privates. Indeed, the novel represents more verbal expressions of hostility and physical

acts of violence between members of the Union army then against enemy troops” (89).

Though Kaplan’s claim might at first seem suspect, a glance at the text reveals the truth

of her words. While militant encounters with the enemy are, until the final pages of the

novel, isolated, brief and impersonal, those between enlisted men and officers are

frequent, detailed, and distinctly personal.

In several places throughout the text, readers witness officers abusing soldiers

both verbally and physically. For example, when the lieutenant observes Henry slacken

his pace prior to battle, he beats him back into line with his sword (Crane, RBC 20).

Likewise, when a terrified soldier flees from the lines in the first engagement, the reader

observes the lieutenant “seize him by the collar and pummel him” before driving him

“back to the ranks with blows” (Crane, RBC 29). This hostility gives rise to anger and

bitterness on the part of the enlisted men. Granted access to Henry’s thoughts, the reader

discovers that the youth hates the lieutenant and “would like to thrash the general” (Crane,

RBC 20, 35). This frustration again evidences itself when the troops are reprimanded by

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their colonel for failing to take the enemy position: “Presently, however, they began to

believe that in truth their efforts had been called light. The youth could see this

conviction weigh on the entire regiment until the men were like cuffed and cursed

animals, but withal rebellious” (Crane, RBC 92).

Finally, this class violence can be observed in the calloused indifference with

which officers treat the sacrifices of their men. This apathy is particularly evident in

chapter eighteen when Henry and Wilson accidentally overhear a conversation between

several officers. Upon being asked what troops he can spare, one of the men declares,

“there’s th’ 304th. They fight like a lot of mule drivers” (Crane, RBC 79). After the

general soberly comments that few of the “mule drivers” will return, the officer shouts a

brief reply and rides away smiling. Throughout this exchange, Henry is shocked by the

officer’s coldness and insensitivity: “The officer spoke of the regiment as if he referred to

a broom. Some part of the woods needed sweeping, perhaps, and he merely indicated a

broom in a tone properly indifferent to its fate” (Crane, RBC 79). Far from inspiring

confidence, this indifference occasions an acute sense of insignificance and injustice.

When viewed in isolation, these passages might appear to advocate a platform

disparaging of powerful, authoritarian figures, yet other quotations contradict this reading.

To be fully comprehended, these excerpts must be examined from the perspective of the

Gilded Age reader. From his/her point of view, officers represented educated elites who

enforced strict discipline and regulation to maintain order and effectiveness within the

ranks. Possessing a higher degree of knowledge regarding battle situations and exhibiting

greater composure under fire, these individuals were responsible for preserving a

semblance of order at all costs—even if it meant mistreating their own men. In their eyes,

83

blind terror and its counterpart, chaos, must be stifled immediately if an effective force is

to be maintained. With this in mind, the reader will discover that many of the officers’

indiscretions are actually committed for the good of the regiment. For example, when the

lieutenant beats the straggling youth back into line, he is merely attempting to keep the

men together and maintain formation. Likewise, when he “grapples” with the youth and

attempts to “drag” him on the assault by force, it is only because he realizes the inherent

danger of the regiment’s present position (Crane, RBC 84). Thus, The Red Badge appears

to promote a paradoxical platform in which abusive behavior on the part of officers is

neither sanctioned nor condoned, but merely permitted out of necessity. Guardians of

law and order, the officers in the novel—much like the strike-breaking forces displayed

in the pages of the illustrated press—perform an imperative, albeit unduly violent,

function. However, by choosing to display this requisite violence through the eyes of an

enlisted soldier, a recipient of martial abuse, instead of from the rationalizing perspective

of an officer, Crane produces an extremely subversive and ironical rendering of this

dilemma.

By juxtaposed engravings from Harper’s and Frank Leslie’s Magazine with

correlating passages from The Red Badge of Courage, this chapter has attempted to

demonstrate that a large percentage of the novel’s imagery originated in the vibrant visual

culture of New York City, specifically in the metropolis’ powerful pictorial press and the

representational strategies it employed. Moreover, believing the violence and upheaval of

his own age to be a lens through which he might access the chaotic landscape of the Civil

War battlefield, Crane appears to have sought out experiences, whether direct or

vicarious, which granted him exposure to the turmoil and strife engendered by

84

mechanization and industrialization, and which enabled him to map a terrain of fear and

aggression which could then be projected back upon the military tableau of the 1860s.

Thus, while alleging to represent the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage actually

renders the tumultuous and highly mediated milieu of New York City during the Gilded

Age.

85

CONCLUSION

By examining three different types of source material and aligning particular

images from the Gilded Age with excerpts from The Red Badge of Courage, these

chapters have sought to locate Crane’s literary aesthetic in the variegated terrain of New

York City’s visual media culture in the latter half of the 19th century. This study has

sought to establish the novel’s intense “intermediality,” a term coined by Bill Brown to

connote the text’s interaction with an array of media forms including drawings,

engravings and photographs, and to reveal the means by which advances in the

photography and the printing process provided civilians access to a domain which had

heretofore been closed to them and greatly affected popular perceptions of war (143).

Though highly mediated, these images were still able to elicit powerful emotional

responses from viewers, and consequently, could be seen as an instrument of propaganda

capable of dramatically altering public attitudes toward war. Already an issue in Crane’s

lifetime, the media’s ability to control public opinion through the manipulation of images

rose to the fore of the national consciousness during the First World War and ushered in

an era of strict government censorship.

The heterogeneous and fragmentary quality of the author’s source material and

the vicarious nature of the experience it provided are manifested in the novel through a

distinct sense of removal, a fractured view of reality, and a wide range of descriptive

metaphors. Crane’s fastidious attention to detail and his tendency to place his reader in

the position of observer/spectator instead of in the role of active participant speaks to the

author’s distance from the events he describes and emphasizes his reliance on secondary

86

experience attained through the medium of engravings and/or photographs. Similarly,

though the work’s disjointed and episodic character is frequently attributed to the

influence of the Impressionist painters, this analysis would seem to imply that the

fragmented and desultory reality proffered by The Red Badge could equally be the

product of the myriad of images which were carefully interwoven into the novel’s visual

fabric. Likewise, the disparate nature of Crane’s source material could be responsible for

the diverse, incongruous and often even contradictory character of his imagery, which in

one passage compares the soldier to a mindless automaton and in the next to a raging

animal.

The influence of the illustrated press is not limited to the novelist’s innovative

style, however, but also affects the book’s content, particularly the persuasions and

ideological constructs promoted therein. In his attempt to portray war realistically, Crane

appears to have assimilated many of the representations of war and conflict found within

the pages of the pictorial press, and in so doing, created a novel which critiques not war

itself but rather the Gilded Age’s perception of war. Thus, Crane’s novel functions as a

cultural “snapshot” revealing the increased accessibility of war during this period and the

transformations in public opinion engendered by this newfound awareness. These

decades marked the first time war images had been made available to the public on a

large scale. Though paintings of famous battle scenes had been commissioned prior to

this point, their audience was limited to those members of the affluent classes who could

afford such costly artworks. Meanwhile, civilian members of the lower and middle

classes—ignorant of war’s true nature—were encouraged to accept romanticized

descriptions of war which celebrated the heroism of the nation’s martyrs and

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conveniently ignored the atrocities and terrors which accompanied these “valiant”

endeavors. Evolutions in photography and printing and the mass circulation of images

which they enabled revolutionized this model allowing the common man to perceive

“war,” albeit in mediated glimpses.

As the novel reflects, the sudden availability of war images during the Gilded Age

gave rise to three pivotal transformations in the public’s perception of war. First, war

itself, which for many 19th century Americans had been a distant and foreign concept

prior to the advent of hostilities in 1861, was recast as spectacle and transmuted from a

serious and lofty venture to a degraded form of entertainment whose sole purpose was the

diversion of the masses. The symbiotic dialogue of realism and euphemism which

evolved around these graphic images constitutes the second paradigm shift. While the

decision to present these violent scenes to the public would seem to signal an attempt to

demythologize war, the euphemistic and rationalizing rhetoric which surrounded them

simultaneously sought to undermine this attempt. Thus the fundamental conflict between

text and image was born—a seminal controversy which has continued to haunt illustrated

newspapers and magazines to the present day. The third transition sparked by the

appearance of war images in the popular press was that of attributed meaning. Though

some pictures were viewed in relative isolation, many others were placed alongside

images/texts describing contemporary incidences of violence. For example, during the

early 1890s, a feature recalling a Civil War battle might easily have appeared in the same

issue of Harper’s as a story detailing a violent melee between strikers and Pinkertons.

Having little experience with war, the Gilded Age audience frequently overlaid one set of

images upon another and projected the events of their own cultural moment upon the

88

locus of the battlefield. This transference has carried through to the present day in which

media depictions of recent conflicts are often colored by the current events surrounding

them. Indeed, these conflations are often fostered by the media which meticulously

arranges images and stories to produce a desired effect.

The changes in public opinion precipitated by the illustrated press’ reconstruction of

war take literary form in Crane’s novel and again in the controversial works of World

War I authors such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Evidencing a literary

aesthetic in many ways akin to that espoused by Crane, the imagery and tone manifested

in these “anti-war” narratives mirrors the new conception of war advanced in The Red

Badge. While the inter-chapters of Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925) offer an extremely

fragmented and disillusioned portrait of the war punctuated by disturbing, photographic

scenes of death and disorder, Dos Passos Three Soldiers (1921) creates a starkly realistic

visual landscape defined by images of mechanical violence and class conflict. The debt

these writers owe to Crane is revealing of the pivotal role The Red Badge played in the

development of the war literature genre.

The subversive opinions articulated in these novels reveal the extent to which the

public perception of war had altered over the previous fifty years. While these

sentiments were by no means the dominant view, their very expression not to mention

publication clearly speaks to the transformative power of the image, which rapidly

demythologized war and often created anti-war sentiment. Perhaps the most persuasive

argument for the war image’s destructive potential, however, is found in the strict

government censorship enforced during World War I. Though prior to this point

decisions regarding what images and/or texts could be published had been relegated

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entirely to the media, these years marked increased government intervention and

regulation. Fearing that violent images of bloodied and dying soldiers lying by the

hundreds in the mud-filled trenches would undermine the war effort, British, French and

American governments banned civilian photographers and correspondents from

approaching the front (Lewinski 63). Likewise, the Espionage Act of 1917 and the

Sedition Act of 1918 forbade the publication of anything which would inspire

insubordination or disloyalty. Authorities were determined that no Alexander Gardners

would capture the faces of dead Americans in this war, nor would any Stephen Cranes

record the events of this tragedy.

While these measures did not completely inhibit pictures from being taken—many

photographs were snapped by soldiers and anonymous civilians—or entirely stifle

seditious rhetoric, they were quite successful in temporarily preventing these images and

texts from reaching the popular press. The moment these measures were lifted, however,

the failure of this artifice was quickly revealed. Though the images of conflict had been

temporarily suppressed, they could not be entirely silenced. Having once been allowed

access to the theatre of war, the public would never be satisfied with prohibition and

concealment. Neither could the popular conception of war be returned to an earlier,

romanticized state. The public would know war, in all its grim reality. Thus, Crane’s

novel marks a watershed moment in the media’s transformation of war and highlights the

pivotal role the illustrated press played in this process.

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APPENDIX 1

91

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SCHOLASTIC VITA

Jamie Lynn Di Frances

UNDERGRADUATE STUDY: Wisconsin Lutheran College Milwaukee, Wisconsin Bachelor of Science in Business Economics and English, 2006 GRADUATE STUDY: Wake Forest University Winston Salem, North Carolina Master of Arts in English, 2009 Thesis Title: “Reflections on Cultural Origins:

The Visual Landscape of The Red Badge of Courage”

SCHOLASTIC AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: 2009 Teaching Assistant, Wake Forest University. 2008-2009 Writing Tutor, Wake Forest University. 2006-2007 English Teacher, Heritage Christian Schools. 2003-2006 Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, Wisconsin Lutheran College. 2003-2006 Writing Tutor, Wisconsin Lutheran College. HONORS AND AWARDS

2007-2008 Full Tuition Scholarship, Wake Forest University 2006 Renaissance Award for English Excellence, Wisconsin Lutheran

College 2002-2006 Dean’s List Highest Honors, Wisconsin Lutheran College